Cultural heritage institutions are collecting a larger variety of media than ever before including external hard drives, computers, and files from hosted cloud services. While there are established workflows and best practices for smaller media objects, many institutions are just now beginning to tackle these other forms of media.

This panel will be a forum to discuss how some institutions are ingesting files from various media types, including the utilization of new tools and the development of new policies and workflows.

Brian Dietz, North Carolina State University

Bertram Lyons, AVPreserve

Porter Olsen, University of Maryland

As institutions become exposed to alternative digital forensic tools and their individual strengths and limitations, they are exploring the benefits of expanding their digital curation toolset beyond reliance on any single product. Moreover, the modular architecture of tools like BitCurator has fostered a growing community of contributors who have developed and shared scripts and modifications to the open source code base.

In this lightning talk session, speakers will share how they are using BitCurator tools as part of their digital curation workflow and how they have expanded BitCurator tools to meet the needs of their institution. The session will also allow time for forum participants to ask questions and share their integration challenges and outcomes.

As processes for acquiring, analyzing, and describing electronic records stabilize, institutions invariably consider access to such materials. Where and how will researchers interact with digital archives? What tools should be available to them? What is the Web’s role in access?

In this breakout session, forum participants will divide into groups to discuss the decision points involved in providing access to born-digital archival materials. The session will begin with a quick brainstorm topics before breaking out. Discussion facilitators will have several topics in mind, but participants are encouraged to have their own discussion topics and provocative statements.

Acquisitions and processing workflows often end with a set of output files from various digital curation software tools, including both content and metadata. How does an electronic records program ensure that the output files can integrate with new or existing platforms for long term preservation? In this session, panelists will discuss their experience with different preservation and description systems, including both open source and licensed systems, and how they have approached integrating the output of their workflows into those systems.

Euan Cochrane, Yale University