Forensics (Digital)

While much has been written on the increasing importance of digital forensics in archival workflows, most of the literature focuses on theoretical issues or establishing best practices in the abstract. Where case studies exist, most have been written from the perspective of larger organizations with well-resourced digital forensics facilities. However organizations of any size are increasingly likely to receive donations of born-digital material on outdated media, and a need exists for more modest solutions to the problem of acquiring and preserving their contents.

In this paper, we investigate how digital forensics tools can support digital curation tasks around the acquisition, processing, management and analysis of born-digital materials. Using a real world born-digital collection as our use case, we describe how BitCurator, a digital forensics open source software environment, supports fundamental curatorial activities such as secure data transfer, assurance of authenticity and integrity, and the identification and elimination of private and/or sensitive information.

The BitCurator Access project will develop open-source software that supports the provision of access to disk images through three exploratory approaches: (1) building tools to support web-based services, (2) enabling the export of file systems and associated metadata, (3) and the use of emulation environments. Also closely associated with these access goals is redaction. BitCurator Access will develop tools to redact files, file system metadata, and targeted bitstreams within disks or directories.

Digital was everywhere at this year’s Society of American Archivists annual meeting. What is particularly exciting is that many of these sessions were practical and pragmatic. That is, many sessions focused on exactly how archivists are meeting the challenge of born-digital records.

Weirder than old: The CP/M File System and Legacy Disk Extracts for New Zealand’s Department of Conservation
from Ross Spencer's Blog:

WHAT DOES FLINT DO?
Flint is a framework to facilitate a configurable file/format validation. Its underlying architecture is based on the idea that file/format validation almost always has a specific use-case with concrete requirements that may differ from a validation against the official industry standard of a given format. The following are the principle ideas we’ve implemented in order to match such requirements.
Who is the intended audience?
Flint is for:

Flint – Validate PDF/EPUB Files against Institutional Policies

A summary of Ricky Erway's , Senior Program Officer at OCLC Research, lightning talk session at SAA 2014 in Washington DC on August 16. The premise was that many archives have received materials in forms that they cannot even read. Archives are acquiring born-digital content at increasing rates and it’s hard enough to keep up with current formats. It makes sense to reach out to the community for help with more obscure media. I found ten speakers who had confronted this problem and figured out innovative solutions to getting material into a form that could be more easily managed.

Abstract:

The application of forensics tools and methods to the curation of born-digital collections in LAMs has advanced significantly over the past several years. It would have been quite surprising, for example, to hear an archivist talking about write blockers or disk images ten years ago, but such terms are now used frequently at archival conferences and increasingly in the professional literature. The BitCurator project is actively working to construct both the tools and the necessary documentation to help LAMs integrate digital forensics into their workflows.