How making changes in Local Format Library impacts your Rosetta instance and Global Format Library

Local FL and Global FL

There are two different instances of Format Library in Rosetta: Local FL and Global FL. Global FL is released and distributed to all Rosetta users and is the “global truth” endorsed by the Digital Preservation Working Group (formerly the Format Library Working Group). Global FL contains mapping, formats, updates, and extractors which were agreed on by the group. Local FL on the other hand is meant for accommodating changes and facts which are exclusively relevant to you, your organisation, or your Rosetta instance. For example, you would like to have local risks that are pertinent to your institution, or you would like to use a different metadata extractor for a certain file format than the one assigned to that file format in the Global FL.

There is one thing to be aware of – changes that you make in Local FL take precedence over settings in the Global FL.

For instance, if you assign PDF-hul-1.17 JHOVE plugin to fmt/18 (PDF 1.4) in your Local Library, it will stay assigned in your instance of Rosetta, even if fmt/18 is assigned to PDF-hul-1.24 in the Global Library version that you install later. Please remember this and monitor your changes in Local FL via the History tab.

Since it is not easy to find out what plugins are assigned to which formats outside of navigating directly to the format entry, we have submitted an Enhancement Request which should help with this. We expect to have the option to display an optional column in the list of Formats in the Format Library showing associated metadata extractors and validators (this is planned for Rosetta 8.0).

Please note that the Global FL is not visible by default in Rosetta. If you only see one “Format Library” heading under the Preservation dropdown menu, then that will be the Local FL.

• Article last edited: 30-01-2023