Examining How Digital Forensics Can Help Process Born-Digital Collection Materials

BitCurator is a suite of open source digital forensic tools used to aid in processing born-digital materials. Although the tools were originally developed for law enforcement, the BitCurator project adapts these tools for use in collecting institutions such as libraries, archives and museums.  At the Harry Ransom Center there are many collections that include born-digital materials.  My project consisted of determining if the tools included in BitCurator would be useful to their processing workflow.  I completed extensive testing with non-collection materials that included email, documents, images, audio and video . Non -collection materials were used in order to ensure that no damage was done to collection materials. The project also included creating disk images, running and analyzing reports and examining metadata.
 

Skills Utilized: Guymager, FTK Imager, pyExifToolGui, Bulk Extractor, fiwalk, premis