Practical First Steps

Last week I helped organise a training day on born-digital archives for the East of England Regional Archive Council. I was joined by Chris Hilton from the Wellcome Library, Ellie Robinson from LSE and Grant Young from Cambridge University Library. The day followed a similar pattern to an event hosted in Hull last November. There were four main elements to the day:

Institutional Overview
The four of us gave a brief overview of the development of digital preservation in our respective institutions and included Chris’s now legendary simplification of OAIS to "Get Stuff - Put stuff somewhere - Keep stuff safe & Show stuff to people".  Ellie talked through the development at LSE from a risk analysis perspective to get institutional backing to then moving on to actually doing it - the latter sentiment being one of the mantras for the day. Grant talked about his work with digital content - much of it digitised rather than born-digital but now occupying an eye-watering 67TB (both LSE and Hull have about 120GB of born-digital material).

Practical First Steps
The four of us then gave a short presentation offering some practical tips; I looked at conducting a survey to identify material already held in the archives and how this often meant the media had been accessioned but not the contents! Chris shared the experiences at Wellcome of 'Dealing with depositors', Ellie looked at 'Handling born-digital material' including accessioning, virus check and other stages at LSE and Grant talked about 'Issues around File Formats' highlighting a number of challenges and suggesting strategies that could be adopted.

Questions and Answers

The day also included two question and answer sessions designed to get delegates talking about the particular aspects and issues of concern to them. Questions touched on a range of topics including depositors, DRAMBORA, how to approach hybrid collections and depositor agreements. We also heard of work being conducted in a number of local authority archives and hopefully they will share their work and experiences with colleagues in the near future.


Demonstrations
Delegates were split into four groups and given demonstrations on using Karen's Directory Printer, DROID and also using FTK Imager with a write-blocker to read a PC hard drive (from my garage) the fourth diversion was a look at two different born-digital scenarios for delegates to consider how they might respond.

There was common agreement on the need to do something, and widespread acknowledgement that there wasn't a single solution or approach. Wellcome, LSE and Hull were all looking at the issue of bulk-ingest into repositories whilst retaining the relationships between files as represented through an often complex series of folders. It so happens that at Hull one of our developers is looking at this very issue so I hope to have an update on this in the next few weeks.

A key theme of the day was collaborating and helpline colleagues and in this spirit all of the presentations are now available on the Hull History Centre born-digital archive pages - thanks to all of the speakers for making this an interesting and informative day.

Not a typical week

At the end of the AIMS project I returned to my post as Senior Archivist with digital archives added to my todo list alongside public searchroom duty, working with paper collections, responsibilities for maintaining our website and online catalogue, managing staff and volunteers etc etc.

This week has not been typical.

Monday
Accession two recent deposits including a small set of floppy disks created between 1995-1999 using a Psion (I think judging by some of the data visible using FTKImager).  The other item was a CD with minutes created in the last couple of years by a charity – so nothing to worry about in terms of formatting but it did highlight issues around filename consistency. I contacted the depositor and they were happy to receive suggestions about future naming conventions which will be a great help. I was also able to ask about material that reflected the complete range of activities of the charity and hope that further material will be forthcoming.

Tuesday

One of the outcomes following the publication of the AIMS White Paper has been to share experiences with colleagues in other institutions. On Tuesday our guests were Nancy McGovern and Kari Smith from MIT and it was a great opportunity to share experiences and discuss aspects surrounding processes, workflows and tools. As always I came away with a list of other tools to try and research papers to look out for! We were joined by my colleague Chris Awre who talked about the work at Hull using Fedora for our institutional repository and in particular Hydra and the opportunity this offered for sharing development work.

Wednesday

Spent some of Wednesday preparing for a one day workshop at Cambridge about born-digital archives next week. The day is designed to encourage colleagues to take the first steps and will include colleagues from LSE and the Wellcome Library and will feature demonstrations of write-blocker hardware and tools including Karen’s Directory Printer and DROID.

Thursday

Received an email out of the blue from a colleague working in Vancouver, which was really nice – they had been following the AIMS Blog and wanted to ask some questions and I was happy to clarify a few aspects that had been mentioned. In replying I also sought more information about their own experiences and whether we had tackled email. Whilst we haven’t tackled this explicitly (yet) I have had a play with the MUSE tool which gives a unique perspective on the stuff with-in an 'mbox' file and offers a sentiment graph that instantly grabs you.

Friday

What better for a Friday afternoon than a quick spell of taking photographs of the floppy disks I accessioned on Monday. It took longer than it should have done due to lack of practice and the need to find something to prop up the disk so we could capture the information written on the edge of the disk – our conservator Christine found a small clear display stand that is ideal and this has been requisitioned for future photographic needs.

This hasn't been a typical week – I have probably done more in the last five days than the preceding two months - but then things rarely are in archives – and for many working in the profession the range and variety is one of the best parts of the job.

Forensic workstation pt 4

Earlier parts of this series had touched on identifying our needs and requirements from a workstation (see part 1), re-purposing an old PC into our first workstation (see part 2) and our early experiences of write-blockers and FTK Imager (see part 3)

Our experiments with our write-blockers have been limited, but each time we get them out of their boxes they seem a little less scary. The recent deposit of some born-digital audio and video material totalling over 200GB has thrown-up a number of new issues for us to consider.

The files came to us on an external hard drive formatted for a Mac that we needed to return to the depositor at which point we knew the files would be deleted - placing greater emphasis on the need to get the capture process correct as we wouldn't be able to return to the depositor and try again!

We were unable to browse the files in Windows Explorer, but were able to see the files using FTK Imager and our USB write-blocker. The sheer size of the files is something we are going to have to get used to with a 45 minute QuickTime film is 10.1GB and a 43 minute wav file is 671MB.

The workstation already has PaintShop Photo Pro for viewing and converting image files but only the standard viewers for audio and video content. So we started to look for open source software for viewing and converting the audio and film files, I wanted something that had a graphical and not a command line interface, as I was keen for other staff to develop skills and experience in handling this type of content.

As with our earlier use of tools like Karen's Directory Printer and DROID once we have become familiar with software we then document our use by creating a simple 'Idiots Guide' - this allows us to record both issues and solutions that we have encountered.

A bit of browsing and a few recommendations later and we have now installed Audacity v2 and WinFF but we will also take a look at others including Handbrake and FFmpeg before making a final decision.

We are keenly awaiting the forthcoming release of the DPC Technology Watch Report on 'Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound' and revisiting the FutureArch blog entries on media formats.

Day of Digital Archives – some personal reflections

To mark the Day of Digital Archives I thought I would add a personal note about the “journey” I have made in the last two years. It was about this time in 2009 that it was announced that the AIMS Project was being funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and that I would be seconded from my post as Senior Archivist to that of Digital Archivist for the project.

At the time I had considerable experience of digitisation but very little about digital archives. So I began reading a few texts and following references and links to other sources of information until I had a pile of paper several inches high of things to read. At first there was a huge amount to take-in – new acronyms, especially from the frightening OAIS, and plenty of projects like the EU funded Planets initiative. It seemed that the learning would never stop – there was always another link to follow another article to read and it was really difficult to determine how much was making sense.

Talking to colleagues who were already active in this field also revealed how little digital media we actually had at the University of Hull Archives – just over two years ago we literally had a handful of digital media whilst others were already talking about terabytes of stuff. Fortunately the AIMS project sought to breakdown the workflow into four distinct sub-functions and placed emphasis on understanding the process compared to ‘traditional’ paper archives which reduced the sense of being overwhelmed by it all.

Since then I feel I have come along way – I have attended a large number of events and spoken at a fair few and quickly become both familiar and comfortable with the language. I do appreciate the time I have been able to dedicate solely to the issue of digital archives and that many colleagues are embracing this “challenge” without this luxury.

The biggest recommendation I can make is to start having a play with the software – many of the tools that we use at Hull University are free – Karen’s Directory Printer for creating a manifest of records including checksums that have been received; FTK Imager for disc images etc etc. Nor do you have to wait for digital archives or risk changing key metadata whilst you are experimenting – you can use any series of digital files or old media that are lurking in the way of a drawer. We have also created a forensic workstation and shared our experiences via this blog.

Once we had started to experiment, we created draft workflows and documentation and refined this as we experimented further – all tasks from photography of media to using write-blockers do become less daunting the more frequently you do them. Having learnt from many colleagues we have started to add content to the born-digital archives section of the History Centre website. I have also used some of my own email to play with the MUSE visualisation tool to understand how it might allow us to provide significantly enhanced access to this material in the future.

Although the project funding has now finished and I have returned to my “normal” job I do think that digital archives has now become part of my normal work and each depositor is now specifically asked about digital archives and in public tours of the building we explicitly mention the challenges and the opportunities of digital archives. We don’t have all of the answers yet – archiving e-mail in particular still scares me, but don’t feel as daunted as I did two years ago.

Forensic Workstation pt3

A guest posting from Nicola Herbert, Digital Project Preservation Assistant at Hull University Archives

Once we had the forensic workstation up and running (see part 1 and part 2 in this on-going series) we installed MS Office and Mozilla Thunderbird (for working with Outlook .pst files). We also installed FTK Imager, Karen’s Directory Printer, DROID and the MUSE e-mail visualisation tool (in beta, but provides a very interesting perspective on the data). We are also planning to purchase Quickview Plus, a piece of software that enables viewing a range of file formats without requiring the original software on your PC.

We had already played around with these tools on our normal PCs and had run them on files copied from digital media prior to setting up the workstation.

Having received our two Tableau write-blockers we were eager to combine the separate processes we had developed into an integrated workflow. We have two write-blockers, one for USB devices (T8-R2) and one for internal hard drives from PCs and laptops (T35es). Simon’s visit to Jeremy John at the British Library had whetted our appetite for getting our mini digital forensics lab in operation.

USB devices
After a thorough read-through of the instructions we tested out the USB write-blocker first. Setting it up is relatively simple; the vital thing is to make the connections between device and write-blocker, write-blocker and forensic PC before switching on power to the write-blocker. The forensic workstation recognises the USB device as normal, and off you go.

We then run FTK Imager to create a logical image of the device. We tested the various formats and settings available and eventually decided that creating true forensic images would raise too many trust issues with potential depositors with regard to us being able to restore deleted files. For this reason we will create ‘Folder contents only’ forensic images which recreate the device as it would appear in normal use. From here we are exploring our options for exporting the files from the disk image, but we have found that the exported files display an altered Accessed date – any comments/suggestions on this issue would be gratefully received.

We also create directory listings of the contents with MD5 and SHA-1 checksums. From the disk image and directory listing we can start to consider the arrangement for the collection, using Quickview Plus to preview file contents.

Our second write-blocker can be used with IDE and SATA hard drives...but more of this in part 4!