While looking at CD and DVD recording hardware I noticed a piece of 
hardware labeled "Forensic Analyzer". Thinking this might be useful for 
media integrity studies I clicked the link. The "Forensic Analyzer" is for 
generating checksums and other information for all files on a disk and then 
comparing it to known hash sets for known files to help identify unusual 
files. While this may be useful to law enforcement it wasn't what I 
expected. However, the literature referred to a format for hash sets called 
"hashkeeper". This is a widely used standard in the law and justice side 
things. This format goes beyond the md5sum output and provides a more 
complete profile of a file. Information on this hashkeeper format was a 
little difficult to locate, but the NIST maintains some information. A 
quick, by example, view of the Hashkeeper format is at:

   http://www.nsrl.nist.gov/documents/CreatingHashSetsmanually.pdf

The NIST also has a format called RDS (Reference Data Set) which profiles 
entire collections. Interesting reading material can be found at the NIST 
Technical Papers for the National Software Reference Library at:

   http://www.nsrl.nist.gov/Technical_papers.htm

While this may be beyond the current needs of the PDS, if we want more than 
the checksum and filename its worth looking at existing standards.

Todd