Digital forensics and digital preservation: Investigating good practice

Check your local time for the event here.

In Jeremy Leighton John’s DPC Technology Watch Report of 2012, he described digital forensics as “a promising source of tools and approaches for facilitating digital preservation and curation, specifically for protecting and investigating evidence from the past” and further notes that “forensic technology makes it possible to: identify privacy issues; establish a chain of custody for provenance; employ write protection for capture and transfer; and detect forgery or manipulation”. In the years since this publication, much work has been carried out by the digital preservation community to further these techniques and to refine and build on this definition. This event offers an opportunity to hear a range of current perspectives and implementations and to join in with discussions on this topic.

This event brings together speakers with different experiences of digital forensics and its use in digital preservation. Speakers include digital preservation practitioners at different stages of working with the techniques, communities creating guidance or tools and academic researchers. This event will provide an opportunity to learn from others and to join wider discussion about digital forensics and how we use it as a community. Speakers will be asked to consider what good practice really looks like in this field and how we can best use the tools and techniques to fulfil our objectives of preserving and providing access to digital content.

Programme (Times in UTC)

13:00 - Welcome

13:10 - Digital Preservation and Digital Forensics: A Marriage Made in Bitstreams - Cal Lee, Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

13:35 - A Digital Forensics Based Approach to Collecting Born Digital Archives at the British Library - Callum McKean, Digital Lead Curator, Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts, British Library

14:00 - Break

14:20 - Archival forensics at the University of Glasgow – a case study on using forensics for appraisal  and AIP generation - Leo Konstantelos, Senior Assistant Archivist (Digital), University of Glasgow

14:45 - Transferring Digital Carriers at Cambridge University Library - Leontien Talboom, Technical Analyst, Cambridge University Library

15:10 - D(A)ANNNG and Forensics: The Extra A is for Agnosticism - Brian Dietz, Dianne Dietrich, Farrell, Lara Friedman-Shedlov, DANNNG (Digital Archival traNsfer, iNgest, and packagiNg Group)

15:35 - Break

15:55 - Born-digital Literary Archives: Forensic Perspectives on an Expanding Field, and Current Challenges for Preservation - Thorsten Ries, Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Texas at Austin

16:20 - Discussion

16:50 - Next steps

17:00 - Close

An additional presentation will be made available at a ‘Watch Party’ event in the Australasia and Asia Pacific region on 29th February:

• Maintaining Good Practice through Policy in Digital Preservation and Digital Forensics - Martin Gengenbach, Digital Preservation Policy and Outreach Specialist, National Library of New Zealand

Discussion about this event on social media can be followed using the hashtag #DPC_forensics.

Recordings (DPC Members, please log in to view)

DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy

The DPC Community is guided by the values set out in our Strategic Plan and aims to be respectful, welcoming, inclusive and transparent. We encourage diversity in all its forms and are committed to being accessible to everyone who wishes to engage with the topic of digital preservation, whilst remaining technology and vendor neutral. We ask all those who are part of this community to be positive, accepting, and sensitive to the needs and feelings of others in alignment with our DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy.