Forensic workstation pt 1

A key part of dealing with born-digital archives is the ability to receive and process material without making changes to the underlying metadata including date created, date accessed etc – data that researchers will be looking to use and rely on. As archivists we place considerable emphasis on our roles as custodians and with digital material it is important that we treat the material carefully and appropriately. Fortunately there are tools that help us with the authenticity of born-digital files the most obvious of which is the checksum.

An important legacy of the AIMS project for us at Hull is working towards our ability to take born-digital material from depositors as a normal part of our work. A key component of this is a forensic workstation – by which I mean a PC (or two) through which material can be safely captured following a clear process, in-effect replicating the isolation room for receiving paper material. This will allow us to undertake a forensic examination – to check the material is what we expected or agreed to take, including the ability to generate a manifest of the material to send to the depositor, and that it does not include viruses etc.

There seem to be two main routes – to purchase FRED which stands for Forensic Recovery Evidence Device (other digital forensic workstation solutions are available). A second and more organic solution, and the one we intend to adopt at Hull, is to start with a new PC and to add appropriate hardware and software to this to provide the equivalent functionality. At the moment we are pondering a name for this with current suggestions including:
- Hal - Hull Archives Laboratory
- Harold – Hull Archives Recovery Of Legacy Data
- Hilary - Hull Investigator for Library and Archives RecoverY
- Dawn – Digital Archives WorkstatioN
but we are open to other suggestions until the machine is installed and formally named!

We don’t want to become a computer museum with an extensive range of hardware, software and operating systems environments for any possible eventuality. We do want a core ability to handle material we reasonable expect to receive – including material on 3.5” floppy disks, zip disks, hard drives etc. We intend to develop and extend our capacity as need dictates – if we get material in a format we will consider whether we need to support this ourselves or whether a suitable 3rd party is more appropriate.

Central to this is the need for write blockers which prevent you from writing or updating the files. Having read countless websites I felt I knew what they were supposed to do but had a nagging doubt that my knowledge was incomplete.

A tour of the British Library eMss Labs courtesy of Jeremy Leighton John (as featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Tales from the Digital Archives' broadcast in May but still available online) confirmed the simplicity of theory and the fragility of the media – just having the hardware isn’t enough – you also need some luck that you have the correct drivers to read the specific version of the media. In the next few weeks I hope to place our order for the various bits and pieces and will update you on this exciting journey!!

Curators Workbench workshop

I was fortunate enough to attend the Curator’s Workbench workshop at the British Library last week. It was a chance to see, have a play and discuss the tool with its developers Greg Jansen and Erin O’Meara from University of North Carolina. The tool is designed to aid with the accession, arrangement, description and staging of material prior to ingest into a digital repository. Essentially the tool has an interface designed for archivists can use.

The session featured a walk-through and chance to have a play with experts on-hand if you had a problem – only necessary as we had latest ‘unstable’ release including the latest enhancements to functionality and GUI. Stable versions are available for download via GitHub. I am especially smitten with the crosswalk feature providing a drag’n’drop interface for mapping the metadata with METS. There is also the date recogniser which allows you to map the date format to the ISO standard, though there could be issues if the data is in a variety of formats, ie 1984 would be transformed to 01/01/1984.

It has a different take to where arrangement and description occurs in the workflow to that intended for Hypatia in the AIMS workflow, but it does raise some interesting questions that I hope to explore in more detail over the next few months.

It was also interesting to hear features and functionality on their wish-list including disc images, multiple users, recording processing notes, PREMIS and so the list goes on!
The discussion that followed was really enlightening as it highlighted the different approaches that archives are currently adopting to the preservation of born-digital archives.

I picked-up some useful pointers to software and tools I haven’t used before – Bulk extractor, Google Refine, and came away determined to throw more stuff at Curators Workbench, to join the users discussion list (done) and to figure out some of the aspects we have avoided so far things like PREMIS and METS etc !

Photographing the digital: creating images of Hull University Archives’ digital media

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

Over the last few months I have been working with the AIMS team at Hull University. My role entails getting stuck into some practical processing of the born-digital collections in the Hull University Archives as well as planning aspects of digital preservation. A lot of our work so far has been to discover and document the material that we already hold in what we thought were purely paper collections and I have written a workflow for the discovery of these items and their preparation for ingest into Fedora. As part of this workflow we decided to photograph all of the removable media we currently have and create a process for photography of new deposits when they arrive.

Why bother?
By retaining photographs of the original media alongside content we will be able to provide an image of the appearance of the original media to researchers if they request it. For the foreseeable future we are storing the image files on a shared drive, but they will eventually be stored as an element of metadata with the digital files in our Fedora Repository. We will be dealing with large numbers of media items so need to ensure consistency in the way the media is photographed and information recorded from those images.

Process
Having not previously numbered the discs, we decided on a simple running number within each accession. Despite our familiarity with labelling paper material, it seemed more complicated with digital. Our conservator advised against sticking labels (even conservation grade) onto the plastic casing of a floppy or Amstrad disc. Though a specialist CD marker can be used to label CDs, we were reluctant to permanently mark the items! After a worryingly long thought process we decided to stick to the old faithful method of writing in pencil on the existing label or case.

I then started planning the process. Despite trying to anticipate the different elements of information to include for each media type, it was only trial runs photographing actual media that gave the full picture - i.e. that Amstrad discs have three aspects to photograph (Side A, Side B and the edge). Lots of seemingly trivial questions arose - like whether to photograph the case or whether to photograph a label if blank. Getting the process right from the start will save time in the long run.

We decided to create a ‘clapperboard’ to photograph with the items for a failsafe way to ensure easy identification. I decided on a reusable form printed on a transparency which we can label with a drywipe marker. Putting theory into practice needed several trial runs; after each one I adapted the form and the procedure.

In addition I wrote up detailed notes describing the procedure for each type of media we anticipate encountering. We worked out a sensible image quality – so to ensure legibility of the labels without clogging up our servers with unnecessarily large images. Once the photographs have been taken they are renamed and filed. We also maintain an inventory of the items and record the media and label information alongside it. This ensures that if we send items (like our Amstrad discs) away to a third party we can match them to our records when they return.

This process has been satisfying to complete and enables us to tick at least one thing off our to-do list. Anyone can get this part of the process completed – even for material which is stored on a shared drive, photography of the original media is a useful process.

AIMS: the UnConference

Not two full weeks into my new job as Digital Archivist at UVa on the AIMS grant, I rolled up my sleeves to facilitate and host an unconference with my fellow Digital Archivists. Our unconference would be two full days of discussions, demonstrations, lightning talks, and networking with digital archivists from around the globe. At first the thought was a little terrifying – I’m not even fully sure I know what this job is yet, how could I actually lead discussions on the salient topics? But my fears were baseless: all the unconference attendees were thoughtful, articulate, and lively participants. I learned much more from them than they probably did from me.

The unconference was held on the 13th and 14th of May at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville. The 27 participants represented libraries, archives, museums, and digital humanities centers across the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Despite the differences in our institutions, backgrounds, and training, we learned that we not only shared similar challenges, but also the same hopes for collaboration and innovation.

The first day started off with a round of lightning talks. Each participant had 5 minutes to present a topic, project, problem or idea that they were interested in talking about. The variety in the talks was remarkable to me, traversing the breadth and depth of all that can be thought of as “born-digital” and the many processes involved in managing it. The lightning talks were also great way to get an introduction to each participant as well as their perspective or the particular issues they were dealing with in their institution. A brief outline of each of the talks is available on the AIMS Unconference Wiki.

Workshop on "Using FTK Imager and AccessData FTK to Capture and Process Born Digital Materials"

On April 22, I conducted a 2-hour workshop on "Using FTK Imager and AccessData FTK to Capture and Process Born Digital Materials.” The purpose of the workshop was to give staff a hands-on experience in using FTK Imager and AccessData FTK. Eight colleagues from the Stanford University Libraries attended the workshop – primarily from Special Collections and University Archives and the Humanities and Social Sciences Group.

The workshop covered the following:

FTK Imager – how to:
1. Download and install the software (free software - http://accessdata.com/support/adownloads).
2. Create a forensic image of an USB flash drive.
3. Create a logical image of the same flash drive.

AccessData FTK – how to:
1. Load an image – for this workshop we used a sampling from the Stephen Jay Gould papers.
2. View technical metadata generated by the software.
3. Arrange column settings to see specific file attribute (e.g. duplicate files).
4. Search for social security numbers using pattern search.
5. Test the full-text search function.
6. Flag files with sensitive information with "privileged" tag (such as those with social security numbers, etc.)
7. Use the bookmark feature for hierarchical information and apply it to groups of files (e.g. series, subseries, etc.)
8. Label groups of files with user defined labels (controlled vocabulary for computer storage media, document type suggested in the workshop, subject headings or access rights, etc.)
9. View files with specific bookmarks and labels.

Many incoming collections are hybrid collections – containing both analog and digital material. The digital component will become even greater as we move forward. Empowering all archivists to use a tool such as AccessData FTK to process the digital materials would be very useful.

Data Management Planning?

Guest blogger: Andrew Sallans

Following on Tom's generous invitation to write a post for the AIMS partner blog, I am finally getting around to doing so. Tom and I have been holding monthly discussions about our respective projects since sometime last summer, and have talked in great length about the commonalities between what my group (the Scientific Data Consulting Group) is dealing with in regards to research data management versus what the AIMS group is dealing with in terms of born-digital archive material.

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/

We have found that there are many areas of similarity, and that we face many of the same challenges, although we approach the problem quite differently and of course have entirely different terminology given our relative perspectives.

To get started, I have a pretty good understanding of the born-digital problem set, but have not been keeping detailed notes on the workflows and solutions that the AIMS group has identified as best practices throughout the life of this project. My intention for this post is to share the issues that we are dealing with in research data management and try to make some suggestions around areas where there may be overlap and opportunities for great information sharing and collaboration.

Starting this past January 18, 2011, the National Science Foundation (NSF) put into effect a new implementation of their pre-existing data management planning requirement. This revision now requires that researchers submit a 2 page data management plan (DMP) that specifies the steps they will take to share the data that underlies their published results. This DMP will undergo formal peer-review, require reporting in interim/final reports, and all future proposals. In effect, what one says must then be done, or else one runs the risk of losing future funding opportunities or worse, losing all funding for the institution from that particular agency. Although this requirement is focused on data sharing, it isn't possible for such an initiative to succeed without first addressing a mass of other data management issues, ranging from technical, to policy, to cultural. As we often point out these days, it is far easier to improve the process of data management up-front, in the operational process phase, than it is to begin thinking about how to share the data at the end of the project. I would expect that those attacking the born-digital archive problem can fully relate.

Here in the Scientific Data Consulting (SciDaC) Group in the UVA Library, we have been collecting and developing our local set of data management best practices for some time and have served as advisors to researchers in both the research data management and DMP development areas (they are of course interrelated, but sometimes have different levels of urgency). In doing so, we have developed what we call a "data interview/assessment" (based in large part upon the visionary work of others, Purdue's Data Curation Profile and work from the UK's Digital Curation Centre, to name a few), which is a series of questions that address many different areas of data management, including context, technical specifications (formats, file types, sizes, software, etc.), policies, opinions, and needs. We meet with researchers to have a conversation, educate them on emerging trends and regulations in data sharing, and listen to their concerns and challenges. In the end, we try to make recommendations on how they can improve their data management processes, and then we offer to connect them with people who can help with the specific details (if it isn't us). For the DMPs, we have a series of templates that are specifically configured for the respective program requirements. Again in this case, we do some education, then offer some feedback and advising on what qualifies as good data management decisions for a particular community. Behind all of these efforts, we know we don't know all the answers, but we do know most of the questions to ask and who we need to pull together to figure out the solutions. That's our basic operating principle.

So, sound a bit familiar? Based on conversations with Tom, and reading some of the posts in the AIMS blog myself, it sounds like we are up against some very similar challenges in regards to the front-end of the issue, around education, conducting inventories and assessments, and figuring out how to manage processes before it comes down to managing the information itself and providing access to it for others. Appraisal and selection is incredibly important to us, but is usually driven more by the type of data. As an example, reproducible data generated by a big machine might not be important to keep, but the instructions and context in which it is generated would be invaluable. On the other hand, data from natural observations (ie. like climate data) would be critical to save. These considerations are not always apparent to the researcher, as they often think within the context of their work, rather than others. I would expect that the back-end is even more similar, as we are all ultimately dealing with bits and bytes, formats, standards, and figuring out how to decide what to keep and how to do it.

Lastly, for now, I also would like to mention that I had the opportunity to attend the annual Duke-Dartmouth Advisory Council meeting at the Fall CNI Forum several months ago.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~vox/0708/0218/infomgmt.html

As you'll read, this project aims to bring together stakeholders from all areas of digital information across the institution, to talk about and plan in a collaborative and strategic way. They aim to tackle the challenges of management, technology, policy, and hardest, culture. I was incredibly impressed by the vision of this undertaking, and hope that we can continue to refine our efforts at developing a collaborative digital information management strategy as well. In practical terms, we all need to try and be attentive to how our effort plugs-in with others around the institution. The issue of digital information management is undoubtedly a very big one, and requires coordination and collaboration across many experts in order to appropriately treat the various bits that we encounter. Doing so will hopefully also provide us with the ability to bring best practices from one challenge to another.

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Andrew is currently the Head of Strategic Data Initiatives and the Scientific Data Consulting Group at the UVA Library.

Contact info: Andrew Sallans, Email: als9q@virginia.edu, Twitter: asallans

Digital Collaboration Colloquium

On Tuesday I attended the Digital Collaboration Colloquium event in Sheffield organised to mark the end of the White Rose Libraries LIFE-SHARE Project.

The day included a number of talks about how institutions can collaborate including an interesting account of the Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum (WHELF) and experiences from the Victoria & Albert Museum. Although the majority of examples focussed on digitisation the principles and lessons learnt were all equally appropriate to a born-digital context.

As part of the day I presented a Pecha Kucha session on the AIMS project and some of the digital collaboration tools that we have found to be effective including Skype and GoogleDocs. In you are not familiar with this format it involves a presentation of 20 slides, changing automatically every 20 seconds and despite cutting the content quite heavily I still found myself chasing to keep-up with the changes. Other sessions looked at digitisation in-situ in a public setting – bringing behind the scenes in-front of the curtain, and other sessions on the Knitting patterns project at Southampton, the Addressing History project based at EDINA and the Yorkshire Playbills project.

The afternoon included a presentation form our hosts on the LIFE-SHARE project and their experiences of the collaboration continuum and a roundtable session that led to a good discussion between panel and audience. With alot covered in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere there was plenty of networking and I’m sure everybody took something from the day.

The presentations are available via slideshare