BitCurator Digital Forensics workshop

This one-day workshop, being held on 29 May in Vienna, at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), offers the opportunity to learn how digital forensics and the use of disk images can support your digital preservation workflows. Supported by expert facilitators Cal Lee and Kam Woods from the University of North Carolina, participants will get hands-on experience using the BitCurator tools including the latest developments with BitCurator Access. The BitCurator Environment is a suite of open source digital forensics and data analysis tools to help collecting institutions (libraries, archives and museums) process and provide access to born-digital materials.

The workshop is organised by Open Preservation Foundation and addressed towards archivists, manuscript curators, librarians or others who are responsible for acquiring, transferring and/or providing access to collections of born-digital materials, particularly those that are received on removable media. It will be assumed that participants are familiar with basic digital curation issues and practices.
Though it is not mandatory, participants will ideally know how to create disk images, generate and verify cryptographic hashes of files and examine the contents of a file in a hex editor. It will also be helpful to be familiar with the role and purpose of file systems, file headers and file signatures. Knowledge of Linux command line operations will also be beneficial, but is not a necessary prerequisite for participation. The organiser will be on hand to help with tasks and many of the tools will have graphic user interfaces.

Participants will learn and get experience of the use of BitCurator environment tools, useful to support various phases of the digital curation, including pre-imaging data triage, forensic disk imaging, file system analysis and reporting, identification of private and individually identifying information, export of technical and other metadata.
They will also learn about tools (currently available but undergoing significant further development) enabling access to data from disk images and redaction of sensitive contents. Participants should leave with a practical understanding of how to apply these tools in their own institutions and with contacts of peer institutions undertaking similar work.

View the workshop agenda here.

Registration is open! For registering click here.
OPF members are invited to attend free of charge. The price for non-members is 75 Euros.

Organiser: Open Preservation Foundation

Venue: AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
Donau-City-Straße 1, 1220 Vienna, Austria

For further info visit openpreservation.org