Xena 4.0 has just been released and although the SourceForge site suggests it only runs on Windows or Linux, it does just fine on OSX as well (after all, it’s a java application).
Xena performs two tasks: it attempts to identify the format of a digital object and then converts the object into a more open format for preservation. Designed by the National Archives of Australia, Xena will convert these objects into an ASCII repesentation containing XML metadata, using Base64 encoding. The name Xena is itself an acronym for the process: Xml Electronic Normalizing of Archives.
I grabbed a copy of Xena and installed it, hoping I had a sort of Swiss Army knife I could use for file conversions but (unfortunately) that’s not what Xena’s about.
Xena is a digital archive workflow tool (another way of saying it doesn’t make much sense outside that narrow context). For example, you must install Open Office on your machine before Xena’s OpenDoc conversion magic can occur (and if OpenDoc conversion is the only magic you seek, Open Office can perform this by itself).
No, Xena is designed to normalize a file for digital preservation. As this little illustration shows, you end up with what looks like a UUENCODE’d email from 1993 updated for the new millennium with an XML header and footer.
So, I guess I just don’t get it. If the goal of digital preservation is to ensure that some user in the future will be able to make sense and productive use of the bitstream, how is converting it to a much more obscure format (e.g., mypicture.jpg becomes mypicture.jpg_JPEG.xena) going to help?
Perhaps if I were to dig into this deeply enough, I’d find that the creators of Xena have made the calculation that it is better to have a single self-documenting file format in the archive. Perhaps they’ve even also decided to store two versions of digital objects: the original and the Xena-ized version. If disk space (and backup time) were no object, that’s the only way I’d make use of something like Xena offers. If I can only store one version of an object, I’ll go with the original (I’m assuming that wide adoption of a format is probably the best hope for future-proofing the content). Put another way, I don’t want to be there in 2027 when someone sticks their head above the cubicle and asks, “WTF? Hey, has anybody ever heard of a .xena format?”
Xena will perform these conversions:
Audio
AIFF converted to FLAC
WAV converted to FLAC
MP3 converted to FLACData
SQL converted to plaintext wrapped in XML
Documents
DOC/PPS/PPT/XLS converted to Open Document
HTML converted to XHTML
RTF converted to Open DocumentMBOX converted to individual XML files
Graphics
BMP converted to PNG
GIF/PCX/PSD/XBM converted to PNG
TIFF converted to PNG with metadata stored in Xena XMLand more.