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Are you starting to receive disks as parts of collections or have you discovered disks in boxes of paper records? Caring for the records stored on removable storage media (e.g., floppy disks, hard drives, thumb drives, memory sticks, and CDs) requires archivists to extract whatever useful information resides on the medium while avoiding the accidental alteration of data or metadata. In this course, you’ll learn how to apply existing digital forensics methods and tools in order to recover, preserve, and ultimately provide access to born-digital records. We’ll explore the layers of hardware and software that allow bitstreams on digital media to be read as files, the roles and relationships of these layers, and tools and techniques for ensuring the completeness and evidential value of data. We’ll apply digital forensics tools and methods to test data in order to illustrate how and why they are used.
Note: This course includes exercises with open-source tools in the BitCurator environment. BitCurator is distributed both as a virtual machine and as an installable ISO image.
Students must be prepared to bring a laptop to the course with the following software already installed. (All software programs are free.) iPads and other tablet devices will NOT be able to perform the hands-on tasks, as these devices do not have adequate resources or allow the level of user control required to run the associated software.
Follow the appropriate downloads for your environment at:
On certain PC laptops, when you first run the BitCurator VM, you may encounter an error message indicating that VT-x is not enabled or that you need to update your BIOS. If this happens, you will need to reboot the machine, enter the BIOS (usuallly by holding down the "Del", "Esc", or "ThinkPad" key), and enable the Intel Virtualization extensions. If your BIOS is locked, you will need the assistance of your local admin.
For Windows 7/8 users:
For Macintosh users:
Archivists, manuscript curators, librarians, and others who are responsible for acquiring or transferring collections of digital materials, particularly those that are received on removable media
Participants are expected to know basic archival practice and have intermediate knowledge of computers and digital records management.
This course builds on others in the Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) curriculum, including Basics of Managing Electronic Records, Electronic Records—The Next Step, Thinking Digital, Accessioning and Ingest of Electronic Records, and Metadata Overview for Archivists.
Interested in hosting a course? Visit our Host a Course page for information on what is required and how to apply!