This paper describes and compares digital curation workflows from 12 cultural heritage institutions that vary in size, nature of digital collections, available resources, and level of development of digital curation activities. While the research and practice of digital curation continues to mature in the cultural heritage sector, relatively little empirical, comparative research on digital curation activities has been conducted to date. The present research aims to advance knowledge about digital curation as it is currently practiced in the field, principally by modeling digital curation workflows from different institutional contexts. This greater understanding can contribute to the advancement of digital curation software, practices, and technical skills. In particular, the project focuses on the role of open-source software systems, as these systems already have strong support in the cultural heritage sector and can readily be further developed through these existing communities. This research has surfaced similarities and differences in digital curation activities, as well as broader sociotechnical factors impacting digital curation work, including the degree of formalization of digital curation activities, the nature of collections being acquired, and the level of institutional support for various software environments.
In this paper, we investigate how digital forensics tools can support digital curation tasks around the acquisition, processing, management and analysis of born-digital materials. Using a real world born-digital collection as our use case, we describe how BitCurator, a digital forensics open source software environment, supports fundamental curatorial activities such as secure data transfer, assurance of authenticity and integrity, and the identification and elimination of private and/or sensitive information. We also introduce a workflow diagram that articulates the processing steps for institutions processing born-digital materials. Finally, we review possibilities for further integration, development and use of digital forensic tools.
Disaster, loss, and failure preoccupy the minds of many digital preservation professionals, and yet, despite the prominence of digital disaster planning guidelines which seem to anticipate failure, there is limited discussion of experience with preservation system or network failures, which are often framed as inevitable in digital preservation. Despite this framing, negative perceptions of failure influence the digital preservation discourse by associating failure with poor planning, unreliability, and untrustworthiness on the part of institutions. This article will interrogate the issue of failure within the digital preservation field and consider the need for more conversations around network failure and recovery. The authors will argue that failure is part of the process of digital preservation and more honest conversations around this topic will contribute to the practice of openness and transparency within the digital preservation community. To illustrate these issues, the authors will discuss the actual hardware failures experienced by the MetaArchive Cooperative, a community-based distributed digital preservation network, and how the Cooperative’s utilization of the LOCKSS software allowed it to recover from those failures. Additionally, the lessons learned and resulting changes the Cooperative made to technical infrastructure, hardware diversity, policies and procedures will be shared.
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