Developing Improved Disk Image Support in Archivematica: A Project Update

Susan Malsbury, Shira Peltzman | BitCurator Consortium

As digital archivists at New York Public Library and the University of California, Los Angeles, we both have a large number of HFS floppy disks in our collections. Our repositories have a focus on collecting in the humanities,and writers and artists in the late-1980s and early-1990s gravitated toward using early Apple computers. This would not be a problem in and of itself, but NYPL and UCLA also both use Archivematica, which was unable to identify and support work on HFS disk images. Previously, Archivematica relied solely on tsk recover to identify file systems but tsk recover does not recognize HFS and many other file systems used by early computers. Together, we sponsored a project to develop functionality in Archivematica to ingest, characterize, and extract files from HFS disk images.

This talk will discuss the impetus for the project, give a report on this work,which began in early-February, and provide details on the specific development steps that make up the project. These include the development of a pre-ingest script that could be used in BitCurator or in Automation tools to identify and record file system information,allow dfxml metadata to be generated, and an extraction tool to extract files from the disk image. Presenters will also suggest possible next steps and potential development tasks that might build on the groundwork that this project has laid.

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Cite this resource:
Susan Malsbury, Shira Peltzman. (April 28, 2017). Developing Improved Disk Image Support in Archivematica: A Project Update. BitCurator Consortium.