BitCurator Users Forum 2019

Levels and Practices of Born-Digital Access: Reports from the DLF Born-Digital Access Group
Providing access to born-digital archival content presents a number of practical challenges, ranging from institution-specific workflows, to access and use policies, to a lack of clarity around researchers’ needs and desires. Compounding these challenges is a lack of community best practices or recommendations, all of which leads to a fractured landscape with respect to born-digital access in special collections libraries. Growing out of in- and semi-formal discussions of practitioners, the DLF Born-Digital Access Group has convened since late 2017 to develop two projects. The first project, which took inspiration from NDSA's Levels of Digital Preservation, is the creation of a set of tiered guidelines that provide benchmarks for levels of access to born-digital material. The second project is the design of a survey for users of born-digital archives to determine what works for them, what does not, and what an ideal access environment might look like. During this presentation, team members from the Levels of Access project will discuss the product of their work, share a one-page summary, and share a report detailing actions that organizations can take. Team members involved in the creation of the access practices survey will present on their work to gather information from users of born-digital archives, including instrument design, methodology and preliminary findings from the survey. Both groups will discuss planned future activities, including public release strategies for the products and feedback and sustainability mechanisms. The presentation will conclude with a discussion with the audience about their institutions' born-digital access practices.
Brian Dietz, NCSU Libraries
Kelly Bolding, Princeton University Library
Shira Peltzman, UCLA Library
Alison Clemens, Yale University
Matthew Farrell, Duke University

Implementing Accessibility for Born-Digital Archival Materials
In 2019, UCLA Library Special Collections embarked on a graduate student-led project to improve our access strategy for born-digital collections with a particular focus on increasing the likelihood that people with disabilities will be able to use this material for research. This presentation will share the results of our efforts to provide more inclusive access to our collections.
Cheryl Cordingley, UCLA
Shira Peltzman, UCLA Library

Establishing a Virtual Reading Room Service: Collaboration, Challenges, and Possibilities
Virtual Reading Rooms (VRRs) hold a promise to provide remote yet mediated access to born-digital and digitized collections, making collections more accessible to researchers who lack funding for long research trips, and reducing the environmental impact of air travel. However, this promise is constrained by practical and philosophical challenges. How to provide access to born-digital collections that may be large in scale, or in diverse formats? What about collections with copyright or privacy issues? How can you manage expectations, and keep technical, policy, and ethical considerations in mind, while still providing access to born-digital and digitized materials?
Heather Smedberg, UC San Diego
Tori Maches, UC San Diego

Gaining control of our legacy media backlog: appraisal of previously unmanaged born-digital material
In this talk I will provide a case study of a project undertaken at Seton Hall University to address the backlog of legacy media containing the working and office files of the Archives & Special Collections department. The primary goal of the project was to identify and preserve information about accessions and processing of the university’s archival collections, and to dispose of information with no enduring value securely and with confidence that no important information was being lost. This process involved systematic disk imaging, appraisal, preservation, and in some cases documented destruction of born-digital material. As a result, we gained better control of our digital materials, identified content for long-term preservation, removed unnecessary material, and created procedures which can be applied to the records of other University departments and collections moving forward.
Brianna LoSardo, Seton Hall University

How Much is Enough? Determining Levels of Digital Forensics
For the past decade or so, cultural heritage institutions have increasingly adopted digital forensics practices into their workflows. Various publications, case studies, and reports have corroborated the place and value of digital forensics in the archival field as it supports the validation and preservation of born-digital files as authentic artifacts. Simultaneously, a growing trend in favor of MPLP processing techniques promotes processing collection material as efficiently as possible to promote access to materials. Yet with seemingly endless digital forensics programs and practices to choose from, the application of various digital forensics processes can slow down processing. Once an institution has committed itself to the adoption of digital forensics in their workflows, how much digital forensics is enough and how much is too much? This presentation will propose a tiered framework for determining which digital forensics applications to apply in different scenarios, helping to categorize and document when it is appropriate to conduct minimal digital forensics versus more thorough examinations. Drawing on trial and error testing, it will include examples of how too little and too much digital forensics impacts different scenarios. Arguing that standardizing digital forensics analyses across all collections slows down processing efforts, this presentation hopes to spark a conversation with digital forensics practitioners about best practices of using digital forensics programs in our workflows. Ultimately, the presenter seeks to begin answering the question: how do we ensure the integrity of our digital objects using digital forensics while simultaneously meeting the demands of the MPLP philosophy?
Kelsey O'Connell, Northwestern University 

How to Frost a Cake: Sweetening the Task of Digital Preservation through Layers of Collaboration
A program of digital preservation must be both a wide and deep-reaching service that enables collaboration between layers of stakeholders, each with domain-specific knowledge and areas of specialization. While the primary issues addressed by digital preservation, suggest purely technical solutions, cross-departmental and intra-institutional collaboration between stakeholders is a first class requirement. Towards these ends, the Digital Preservation Unit provides user support and management of our digital preservation system, working in direct collaboration with, and often, as a layer between our various users and partners from across the University. Stakeholders in the system include those responsible for collections, including Archivists, Librarians, and Curators from the institution’s Libraries, Museums, and Galleries, and those who provide support including our primary systems administrators and developers in Library IT, infrastructure engineers in Central IT, and the vendors of our preservation system software and other services including cloud storage and communications infrastructure. Providing a robust, effective, and widely used digital preservation system requires support for all stakeholders in a manner that abstracts the overall complexity and lowers barriers to fulfilling each repository’s use cases. The session will explore the Yale Digital Preservation service through the experiences of users from the Libraries, Museums, and systems administrators, while exploring the practices and tools used to support each area’s needs. The purpose of this panel is to illuminate and discuss the implementation of collaborative practices that promote Yale repositories’ shared goal of preserving culturally significant digital collections.
David Cirella, Cate Peebles, Alice Prael, Bob Rice, Kevin Glick, Yale University Libraries

Open session where people can ask questions to the entire audience. Anything goes! These could be questions related to workflows, policies, things you are struggling with, something you'd like some advice or guidance about. 

The Emperor's New Grooves: Recognizing Multisession CD-ROM tracks not captured in disk images
This talk will focus on two related optical media format types that cropped up in the mid-1990s through the 2000s: Enhanced Music and MultiSession CDs. The Enhanced Music CD format (or CD-Extra, or CD-Plus) was found in multimedia releases of popular music albums and other multimedia content, while MultiSession CDs can be commonly found when sorting through personal collections, as so many of us once backed up our files on optical media. (Full disclosure: the authors admit that they have done this, too.) Each format poses challenges during the imaging and analysis process. Following a technical overview of both formats, we will discuss how to identify this type of material, including the types of results that are typically found when such discs are imaged using techniques designed for data CD-ROMs. This talk builds on work on Blue Book CDs reported by the OpenPreservation Foundation in 2017 on modifying existing image files to allow for navigation of the file system, and we aim to offer further analysis on strategies that allow resulting disk images to more fully integrate within automated processing workflows. We'll go over tools suitable for imaging and analysis for when the original source media is still available, and techniques for post-imaging analysis when the source media is no longer available.
Dianne Dietrich, Cornell University
Alex Nelson, NIST

Disk Imaging and Digital Forensics in  Media Art Conservation
Over the past several years, the prevalence of computer and software-based art in contemporary museum collections has prompted serious discussion and research, through various forums, symposia, and peer networks, to address the unique challenges in caring for these types of artworks. Within this context, media conservators have sought tools and techniques to deal with the urgent need to backup data from aging computers, hard drives, floppy disks, and optical discs in museum collections. One practice that is emerging amongst conservators, drawing from digital forensics and widely adopted by libraries and archives, is disk imaging. This panel will share the findings of a year-long cross-institutional collaborative examination of disk imaging between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The panelists will address key issues including: 1. The development of practices and guidelines for condition-checking, quality control, and troubleshooting of disk images after their creation, and; 2. the difficulties of using a disk image to run a software-based artwork independent of the original hardware while ensuring a faithful representation of its core work-defining properties. Recognizing that the creation of a disk image is just one step at the beginning of an artwork’s preservation life-cycle, the panelists will engage in a frank and open discussion about their successes and failures with creating and managing disk images. This panel hopes to generate a dialogue which will continue to develop as conservators adopt and experiment with these methods.
Jonathan Farbowitz, Guggenheim Museum
Eddy Colloton, Hirshhorn
Flaminia Fortunato, Museum of Modern Art
Caroline Gil, Museum of Modern Art