Bringing BC Tools and Strategies to Windows
Indiana University started using the BitCurator Environment in 2015 and by 2017 staff had deployed two dedicated workstations in our Born Digital Preservation Lab. The benefits of this approach are no doubt obvious to members of the BitCurator community: in addition to a pre-installed suite of digital forensics and data analysis tools, the Linux-based operating system allowed staff to recognize and extract content from multiple file systems. At the same time, our local desktop support services were limited to Windows and so digital preservation staff were responsible for addressing hardware and software issues. As a result, when the workstations were scheduled for replacement in 2018, we elected to replace them with Windows machines and implement many of the tools found in the BitCurator Environment. In this presentation, I would like to share our approach to implementing a BitCurator-like environment on Windows and how we were able to adapt resources--in particular, Tim Walsh’s Brunnhilde and Disk Image Processor--to automate significant portions of our content migration and analysis workflows (and at the same time capture associated preservation metadata). While more work is needed to refine our procedures, our progress thus far highlights the value of a shared community of practice in the advancement of local digital preservation goals.
Mike Shallcross, Indiana University Libraries
A Pinch of Salt: Creating Customized BitCurator builds
Have you ever wanted to customize the BitCurator environment? Thanks to decisions made by the BitCurator developers, modifications can be made quickly and easily using the open source configuration management software Salt. The talk will give an overview of how to make modifications to the BitCurator environment to create repeatable customized installations. Two case studies will be explored: the first, adding a customized configuration file to modify the labels used by the Guymager software. The second, a work-in-progress project to create automated builds of the desktop environment in widely available cloud computing platforms.
David Cirella, Yale University
Understanding performance of digital forensics tools with NMon
One of the challenges of working with digital forensics tools, especially at the command line, is understanding how they are performing. Typically lacking user friendly status indicators and clear error messages, we often find ourselves wondering if these tools are working optimally or at all. Reporting on the work of Stanford Born Digital Forensic’s Lab Assistant, Sandy Ortiz, we will discuss how to gain insight into the performance of digital forensics tools including Bulk Extractor and Brunnhilde using NMon, a computer performance monitoring system for Linux. Using NMon, Sandy has discovered some useful strategies for interpreting the performance of these command line tools, providing the basis for testing the configurations of these tools in order to improve their performance and shorten processing times.
Sally DeBauche, Stanford University Libraries
How BitCurator is Helping to Save a Decade of Lost Photographs
In 2016, the Goddard Archives became custodians of approximately 7,000 optical disks that span a decade of Goddard Space Flight Center history, with more than one third of these CDs containing proprietary format image files. These proprietary CDs cover nine years and are high-risk, as the original photographic materials they were born from, including the negatives and original prints, were lost in a flood. The creating office transferred this material to us with very little metadata and no documentation on the contents or creation of the optical disks. With no background in digital forensics and no budget, the Goddard Archives relied on open resources from the community and technical support from the Goddard Library’s digital team. After starting a pilot project in fall 2018, we were able to recover 30% of the high-risk CDs and begin the project that will recover the remaining 6,000+. For this project, the Archives created image copies of each CD using Guymager and ran reports to determine content and duplicate sectors. From this data, we created visualizations to synthesize our findings and refine our workflow. In this talk, I’ll walk through our project workflow, findings, and lessons learned. This documentation will be used to inform and create best practices and policy within our program. I’ll also highlight key decision points and how the visualizations aided us in making these decisions. Finally, I will give an update on our current standing within the final project.
Jessica Deibert, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Archives
Review, Appraisal and Triage of Mail (RATOM)
Review, Appraisal and Triage of Mail (RATOM), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the State Archives of North Carolina. RATOM is extending the email processing capabilities currently present in the TOMES software and BitCurator environment, developing additional modules for these tools along with select standalone software to support more advanced workflows. These will include identifying and reporting on entities present within emails and email attachments; identifying materials requiring redaction or review due to the presence of potentially sensitive information; and developing software modules to assist with preparation of materials for release or public access. The project will rely on existing (mature) software libraries to provide core support for identifying and extracting the contents of email-containing formats, NLP tasks, and machine learning approaches.
Cal Lee, University of North Carolina
Sangeeta Desai, State Archives of North Carolina
Adding “Why” Questions to the BitCurator QuickStart Guide to Build a Comprehensive Graduate Archival Teaching/Learning Module
The BitCurator QuickStart Guide (https://github.com/BitCurator/bitcurator-distro/wiki/Releases#quickstart-guide), designed as a software installation and application manual, provides step-by-step instructions for practitioners to download and run the software tools. As part of the BitCuratorEDU research project, students from the Catholic University’s Library and Information Science Program used the QuickStart Guide to install BitCurator and run several forensic tools in spring 2019. In guiding her students to complete the work and class panel discussion, the instructor came to realize that there are many “why” questions remaining unanswered even though students have successfully installed and run the tools. The proposed lightning talk will discuss some of those “why” questions that can be used in association with the Guide to support graduate-level teaching/learning for archival students.
Jane Zhang, Catholic University
