DROID is a tool developed by The National Archives (TNA) to perform automated batch identification of file formats. It’s a free and open source software and the source code can be downloaded from our GitHub repository. Information about file formats including the identification signatures utilised by DROID are kept within PRONOM, TNA’s file format registry.
Users have the rights to use, study, change, and distribute open-source software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. We have developed DROID in a collaborative public manner. We’re very lucky to say there is a supportive community behind DROID, it’s well used (500 direct downloads of version 6.5.2 from the TNA website, released in Jan 2022) within the digital archives community. TNA isn't complacent about this and value this relationship. TNA also rely on the tool for some of our own services.
The National Archives have been working in the background to bring some improvements to DROID, with these objectives:
-
unifying the underlying code base for both a command line interface and graphical user interface
-
integration of DROID into cloud
-
enabling integration with other systems at TNA
To date we’ve been, in a sense, eating our own dog food and this has been sufficient so far. The fixes we’ve made have been in the background, to allow us to progress to the meatier objectives. These smaller improvements have included security updates related to log4j and performance improvements around Java versioning. We’ve also unified the underlying code base so that it's easier for users to access DROID. Our next steps are using cloud technology to improve performance. However, we’ll also need to validate or disprove assumptions about how users interact with DROID, what the pain points they experience and what they care about getting fixed first.
So, we’re working hard to improve DROID but we need your help. The next release contains all the things described. We’d like users to tell us if it meets their needs, and make improvements that users tell us are important to include in our roadmap.
The nature of our iterative process allows space to learn from mistakes and we’re here to learn. We want people to feel included to allow DROID to grow and we take constructive feedback as a gift.
Here are some ways to contact the team at TNA.