Quality Assurance Tools and Techniques
Purpose
Quality assurance is a crucial step in the digitization process. Ensuring quality of (semi) large collections whether produced by outsourced services or created in-house by multiple persons can be an overwhelming prospect. The following guide will show how you can use tools and techniques for confirming digitization specs and help identify possible errors or corrupt files using via automated tools.
This guide will show how to:
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Confirm all files are unique (no duplicates)
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Filenaming schema is consistently used
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All files are valid and well-form
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Confirm received the expected number of digital objects (completeness)
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Confirm technical specifications
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Help identify possible errors or corrupt files
Summary of actions and tools
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Action
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Tools
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Format identification and verification
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DROID and JHOVE
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Review technical specifications
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EXIFTOOL
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Verify filenaming schema
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DROID or EXIFTOOL or CLI + Excel
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Confirm inventory (count and item level)
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DROID or EXIFTOOL or CLI + Excel
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Tools
Techniques
Using Excel to perform quality assurance of digital objects
Guides for other related tasks
- General best practices for Quality control checks
- Batch create PDFs – PC (ImageMagik + Adobe Acrobat) https://tinyurl.com/y7whamxb
- Batch create PDFs – Mac (Poppler/pdfunite) https://tinyurl.com/y8mtgrfe
- Batch embed metadata – to ensure files contain some descriptive information directly, best practice is to embed basic metadata such as title, source and copyright. See guide for using exiftool commands or other tools, https://tinyurl.com/7xz3hbm.
- Batch rename files (command line) -- If you need to rename files to match project filenaming conventions, see Steps to batch rename files
- Transfer large number of files – Best practices recommend copying digital files from an external drive to a separate location (e.g. project server). This provides a backup of source files before any processing. Both utilities provide detail status of transfer and will retry transfers until done, in case of interruption. Robocopy (PC) http://tinyurl.com/ke9esag; rsync (Mac) http://tinyurl.com/kgoqb2c
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