The RAND Corporate Archives serves as the organization’s corporate memory. The Archives collects, preserves, organizes and provides access to materials that document RAND’s story, people and impact from 1948 to the present. Within the archives is the Willis H. Ware Digital Collection (donated by the … Read more →
BitCurator: Beyond Environment This is a modified version of “BitCurator: Beyond Environment,” a talk I delivered remotely at the BitCurator Users Forum 2018, “Living on the Edge: Extending Digital Forensics into New Sectors.” The slides, with notes, are available through the community shared presentation and … 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 →
This is a recording of a BitCurator Consortium public webinar on “BitCurator NLP Project”. The BitCurator NLP project has been developing software for collecting institutions to extract, analyze, and produce reports on features of interest in text extracted from born-digital materials. The project is adapting … Read more →
As a means to more efficiently process large-scale digital archives and with inspiration from Jess Whyte’s scripting work at the University of Toronto, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is developing a set of software tools for automating triage, SIP creation, and description of born-digital … Read more →
The BitCurator environment supports a variety of digital curation activities. The BitCurator Access project extended this to the point of interaction with end users, providing and supporting a variety of access mechanisms. We developed tools that support access to disk images through three exploratory approaches: … Read more →
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 … Read more →
This talk will discuss the RAC’s Digital Media Log, a lightweight web app that integrates with ArchivesSpace to efficiently inventory digital media items and log digital forensics and preservation activities. The application is intended to track inventorying and preservation workflows in an automated digital forensics … Read more →
Often, those who are doing the nitty gritty digital archiving and those who are working with donors are two separate entities. In these cases, providing strong guidelines, policies, and documentation to help archivists and curators in obtaining and managing born digital content is key to … Read more →
Way back in the day, before there was a widely acknowledged set of skills and tools known as Digital Forensics, the boots-on-the ground needed to figure out ways to deal with information from a crazy number of incompatible word processors, minicomputers, and mainframes. The work … Read more →
The KryoFlux, a floppy disk controller card developed by the Software Preservation Society, has become the de facto standard for many digital archives for its ability to safely and effectively capture data from aging floppy disks. Although the KryoFlux is an extremely powerful tool for … 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 →
“Delete the logs” has become a mantra for security experts post-election as organizations work to minimize risk to populations who are often already targeted for surveillance. But what happens when your professional responsibilities as an archivist demand that you preserve the logs? This presentation will … Read more →
This workshop will be aimed at intermediate to advanced users who have a solid understanding of digital forensics and BitCurator basics, and are looking to extend and advance their knowledge and skills. Topics may include: Repetitive tasks that could benefit from automation yet currently require … Read more →
Over the course of the day, attendees in the beginner track will participate in a range of activities meant to introduce the BitCurator environment and prepare participants for the proceedings on Day 2 of the User Forum. The morning will start with a brief introduction … Read more →