Digital Forensics for Libraries and Archives: Introduction to Using BitCurator
This workshop is at maximum capacity and no longer accepting registrations.
BitCurator (BC) is a digital curation environment geared toward librarians and archivists that combines a set of digital forensics tools in the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. The BC environment includes a suite of open source digital forensics and data analysis tools to help collecting institutions process born-digital materials. It can be run as a main operating system on a single workstation, or it can be run in a virtualized environment (that is, the entire system is running by itself inside another program on your computer).
Assuming no prior knowledge, this workshop will first provide an overview of the environment. We will then focus on an exercise to create disk images of and transfer data from legacy media, including Zip disks and 3.5” floppy disks before walking through some of the tools available on the BC environment for analyzing them, including capture of basic system characteristics and metadata, as well as scanning for potentially sensitive information. Through a combination of hands-on work and demos, participants will gain experience with tools such as Brunnhilde (a reporting tool for directories and disk images), bulk_extractor (scan for credit card numbers, emails, etc.), and fiwalk (print filesystem statistics). The workshop will then turn to a discussion of how to build workflows that fit your institution’s needs, open discussion of digital preservation practices, and continued work on your own using sample removable media.