Indiana University started using the BitCurator Environment in 2015 and by 2017 staff had deployed two dedicated workstations in our Born Digital Preservation Lab. The benefits of this approach are no doubt obvious to members of the BitCurator community: in addition to a pre-installed suite of digital forensics and data analysis tools, the Linux-based operating system allowed staff to recognize and extract content from multiple file systems. At the same time, our local desktop support services were limited to Windows and so digital preservation staff were responsible for addressing hardware and software issues. As a result, when the workstations were scheduled for replacement in 2018, we elected to replace them with Windows machines and implement many of the tools found in the BitCurator Environment.

In this presentation, I would like to share our approach to implementing a BitCurator-like environment on Windows and how we were able to adapt resources–in particular, Tessa Walsh’s Brunnhilde and Disk Image Processor–to automate significant portions of our content migration and analysis workflows (and at the same time capture associated preservation metadata). While more work is needed to refine our procedures, our progress thus far highlights the value of a shared community of practice in the advancement of local digital preservation goals.