The first day of the BitCurator Users Forum will feature an introduction to digital forensics workshop aimed at practitioners who are just getting started working with digital forensics tools and methods. This workshop will include an overview of digital forensics concepts, and will mostly focus … Read more →
This workshop will be an interactive session about use of open-source natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) tools to process and provide access to born-digital materials. It will focus on applying topic modeling and named entity recognition to characterize and explore contents of … Read more →
Although appraisal is a well established archival concept, the appraisal of born-digital collections is often a daunting task. The sheer scale and heterogeneity of born-digital files presents a unique challenge for an archivist approaching the task of appraisal. Although natural language processing and machine learning … Read more →
The cultural heritage community has engaged with environmental sustainability in many areas, but is only beginning to explore the sustainability concerns of digital preservation activities. Building off of a recent American Archivist article (“Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation”: https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165 or http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40741399), in which the authors … Read more →
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 … Read more →
The BitCurator Consortium (BCC) is hosting the 2019 BitCurator Users Forum at Yale University on October 24 and 25. The Center presents the second day of the forum in its Lecture Hall. The BitCurator Users Forum brings together representatives from libraries, archives, museums, and related … Read more →
Have you ever wanted to customize the BitCurator environment? Thanks to decisions made by the BitCurator developers, modifications can be made quickly and easily using the open source configuration management software Salt. The talk will give an overview of how to make modifications to the … Read more →
This workshop will be a series of facilitated participatory discussions and activities that will identify answers and then develop community goals that address 3 questions: What are the key current problem areas for the field of digital curation? The facilitator will bring some to discuss … Read more →
One of the challenges of working with digital forensics tools, especially at the command line, is understanding how they are performing. Typically lacking user friendly status indicators and clear error messages, we often find ourselves wondering if these tools are working optimally or at all. … Read more →
In 2016, the Goddard Archives became custodians of approximately 7,000 optical disks that span a decade of Goddard Space Flight Center history, with more than one third of these CDs containing proprietary format image files. These proprietary CDs cover nine years and are high-risk, as … Read more →
Review, Appraisal and Triage of Mail (RATOM), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the State Archives of North Carolina. RATOM is … Read more →
The BitCurator QuickStart Guide, designed as a software installation and application manual, provides step-by-step instructions for practitioners to download and run the software tools. As part of the BitCuratorEDU research project, students from the Catholic University’s Library and Information Science Program used the QuickStart Guide … Read more →
This panel discussion follows the “Let’s-do-this-a-thon” session on the intersection of journalism and digital preservation from Day 1 of the BitCurator Users Forum. Leaders in this area will present and analyze challenges in preserving digital journalism, as well as describe current work in this area, … Read more →
How reliable are our forensic tools? Working with born digital files requires the use of various tools, and there is an expectation that the software will perform as advertised. The tools do not always work properly, but problems are usually apparent in the form of … Read more →
Communities of Practice: Building a Foundation for Born-Digital Processing When I arrived at UNC Wilson Special Collections Library in 2016, newly hired in a digital archivist role, I found that roles for born-digital processing work were complex and distributed. This led me to start thinking … Read more →
A practical approach to working with proprietary file formats At The New York Public Library, archival collections increasingly contain proprietary file formats related to music and video editing, desktop publishing, and design and drafting software programs. This presentation will discuss approaches the Digital Archives Program … Read more →
This panel will discuss the substantial findings and documentation produced in the first year of the OSSArcFlow project, a collaborative effort of the Educopia Institute, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (UNC SILS), LYRASIS, and Artefactual, Inc. … Read more →
At the DLF Forum 2017, members of the DLF Born-Digital Access Group held a working lunch and discussed issues related to preparing and providing access to born digital archival materials. Following that meeting, a subset of the group formed to create, as one of its … Read more →
Several incidents in recent years have demonstrated the necessity of digital preservation in the media: the deletion of the Gothamist, DNAinfo, and LAist sites, and the battle for ownership of Gawker’s content have made it clear that, although journalists and information professionals are in agreement … Read more →
Forensic disk images provide the best means of accurately capturing, and ensuring the authenticity of, all of the data on a physical carrier. However, unexpected, deleted, private or sensitive, and system data introduce ethical complexities for archivists and repository administrators when developing disk image retention … Read more →