The project

Cultural heritage is something we like to preserve for future generations. Unfortunately, not all heritage artifacts are easy to preserve. Digitalisation of those artifacts provides a solution to this problem. In order to digitise old artifacts, for example newspapers, TIFF files can be used. This is an uncompressed image format that can contain a lot of technical information. The internal structure of those files have great importance if we want to store them for the future. We have to know exactly what the files look like so that they can persist for a long time.

Digitisation of antique objects is one of the main occupations of Meemoo, the Flemish Institute for the Archives. Meemoo used to work with a tool called DPF Manager in order to check the internal structure of TIFF files. This tool checks whether a TIFF file is compliant to a certain standard or not, if it follows some policy rules and so on. The DPF Manager application was a little outdated and not always very user friendly.

This is why Meemoo asked us to create a new and fresh interface including a new name and logo using the same functionality as the DPF Manager. ArTIFFact Control is a new version of the deprecated DPF Manager that validates the internal structure of TIFF files. Apart from a complete design overhaul, ArTIFFact Control uses an adapted version of JHOVE for the back-end. The application connects to the JHOVE REST API to validate the structure of the files containing cultural heritage objects.