System Reboot: Rapid Response and the Power of Grassroots Data Rescue Founded in February 2025, the Data Rescue Project has worked to preserve and expand access to at-risk federal datasets. What began as a single Google Doc has since grown into a robust data rescue … Read more →
A Barrel of Monkeys: Archiving a Mailchimp Newsletter Email newsletters are something that we would often prefer to unsubscribe from rather than keep in our inboxes. However, this format continues to be popular with many individuals and organizations and can contain valuable information to preserve … Read more →
I ♥ Unicode The practice of digital preservation often involves negotiating between an intended outcome and unexpected behaviors from the technologies involved. The impact of evolving standards, implementation decisions made in ancillary systems, and unintended use cases from throughout computing history often requires us to … Read more →
Three Esoteric Email Recovery Methods A simple series of case studies of recent challenging email recovery experiences at the Schlesinger Library. Zachary Maiorana showed us three examples of challenging email acquisitions and discussed how they went about recovering the media to a usable state. The … Read more →
PDF Pipelines: Testing preprocessing methods in our Bulk Extractor workflow Stanford University Libraries uses Bulk Extractor to review our digital collections for personally identifiable information. While engaged in a project of reviewing a series of PDF-heavy digital collections, we found that we wanted to test … Read more →
Mediating Access to BitCurator Data BitCurator provides archives with helpful tools for accessing and analyzing data. However, the outputs of these tools (disk images, logs, etc.) can be hard to maneuver for patrons who might not know how to use things like a disk image … Read more →
Fedora 6.x was a game-changer. But now what? Let’s take a moment and think that one through. In the world of open source technology, where a community’s entire existence hinges on innovative development, increasing adoption rates, and iterating to meet ever-changing needs, hitting reset, or … Read more →
Lessons in Digital Stewardship from the AACAT-1870 Founding Graduate Cohort As digital archives tools continue to evolve, many archival conversations center on technology rather than the communities whose histories these systems are meant to preserve. This presentation reflects on what it means to “hit reset” … Read more →
What We Struggle to Answer: Operational Metrics for Digital Preservation When your stakeholders ask how many items you ingested last quarter, what your processing backlog looks like, or what it costs per terabyte to run your digital archives program, many of us go quiet. Not … Read more →
“Fearless and Undefined:” What Starting a New Job Sounds Like Starting a new digital preservation job can feel a lot like hitting reset, even when you’ve been in the field for a few years – figuring out where things were left off, what workflows and … Read more →
“IT has identified several challenges and concerns”: Navigating Organizational Disconnects to Champion Digital Preservation Digital preservation remains an essential practice within cultural heritage institutions; however, it is still a widely opaque concept to many administrators and IT professionals, which makes it difficult to build a … Read more →
Replacing Legacy Preservation Storage in a HIPAA-Regulated Repository Historical Collections and Services at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) Claude Moore Health relied on a legacy Network-Attached Storage (NAS) system implemented under prior leadership. When we were alerted that the system was outdated and experiencing bitrot, … Read more →
Hitting Reset on Automation: Knowing When Custom Scripts Aren’t the Answer With expanding backlogs and increasing pressure to enhance discovery and accessibility, automation can feel like a godsend. Using generative AI to create Python scripts, I built a suite of small tools that now handle … Read more →
Great Question! Forum 2026 Great Question!, a staple of the BitCurator Forum, is your chance to ask the community anything related to digital archives and curation.