Forensics (Digital)

The FotoForensics site can be a valuable tool in checking the authenticity of an image. It’s easy to alter images with software and try to fool people with them. FotoForensics uses a technique called Error Level Analysis (ELA) to identify suspicious areas and highlight them visually. Playing with it a bit shows me that it takes practice to know what you’re seeing, but it’s worth knowing about if you ever have suspicions about an image.

Personal Digital Archiving 2015 was held in New York City April 24-25, 2015.
The presentations from this meeting are now available at the conference web site, where they are linked to the individual day agendas, at:

http://personaldigitalarchiving.com/program/

Video from the sessions can be found at the Internet Archive, at

https://archive.org/details/PDA2015

The latest release of the BitCurator environment (1.5.1) is now available at our wiki (http://wiki.bitcurator.net). Direct links and MD5 checksums can be found on the wiki, or you can follow the links below:
The BitCurator 1.5.1 Virtual Machine
The BitCurator 1.5.1 Installation ISO
This is the first public release of BitCurator built with our new bootstrap and upgrade automation tool (https://www.github.com/

Exciting terms get overused and worn down with time. I can remember when “awesome” meant magnificent, extraordinary, awe-inspiring. Today it’s barely stronger than “that’s nice.” Maybe it’s inevitable; people like to use words with a strong punch, even when they’re excessive.

We’ve written about the BitCurator project a number of times, but the project has recently entered a new phase and it’s a great time to check in again. The BitCurator Access project began in October 2014 with funding through the Mellon Foundation. BitCurator Access is building on the original BitCurator project to develop open-source software that makes it easier to access disk images created as part of a forensic preservation process.

Libraries and archives at Harvard hold thousands of unique items across hundreds of digital formats, including aging technology such as CDs, floppy disks, tapes, and cassettes. To retrieve content prior to total obsolescence or decay of digital formats, librarians are using digital forensic software commonly employed by the police or the FBI to solve crimes, which enables them to identify content noninvasively and migrate it to a more stable platform.

When Kathleen O’Neill talks about digital collections, she slips effortlessly into the info-tech language that software engineers, librarians, archivists and other information technology professionals use to communicate with each other. O’Neill, a senior archives specialist in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, speaks with authority about topics such as file signatures, hex editors and checksums even though she has a traditional paper-centric Master of Library Science degree.

This month I received a reference request that involved a digital collection we acquired some months back. It’s not an unusual type of reference question but I thought I’d blog about it as a use case for digital archives. The request came from the office of origin so we provided the reference directly.

“Digital forensics” is a buzz phrase repeated often in the archival communities today, but what does it mean? How will it apply to the backlog of born digital materials? Through a brief overview of digital forensics frameworks and applications in archival workflows, as well as several case studies, audience members will understand how better to approach complex materials on hard drives, floppies, and optical media. They will come away with an understanding of some of the key steps in a digital forensics workflow, such as write blocking, disk imaging, and intellectual arrangement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeAWVoQtCVs&list=PLJfQmTStwzSO48DJalzD3Q...
Michael Olson at CurateGear 2015. Get slides for this and other CurateGear talks at http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/curategear2015-talks/olson.pdf