Universal Access
Digital forensics is focused on the recovery and investigation of material found on digital media. As digital object proliferate, digital forensics technologies is used in cultural heritage settings to work with the various types of electronic media within collections. Digital forensic tools and methodologies are concerned with many of the same issues that challenge digital archivists: safe recovery of electronic files, and the authenticity and reliability of the electronic file as a historical document. 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. It can extract and mine relevant metadata and content; enable efficient indexing and searching by curators; and facilitate audit control and granular access privileges.
In the world of digital archives, it is important to distinguish between two categories of digital materials. One set of materials are digitized (made digital) from an analog source. An example of this process is scanning a photograph to create a digital format like an .tiff or .jpeg file. The other set of digital materials have always been digital which refers to formats like websites, Word documents, or emails. This set of materials is referred to as "born-digital" to distinguish it from physical materials that have been digitized.
| BitCurator | FRED Digital Forensics Machine | Legacy Controllers and Machines |
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BitCurator project put together an open source suite of digital forensics tools specifically to be used in library and archives born-digital workflows. It contains a range of tools that can be run from a Linux environment. The available tools include:
SCUA maintains a quarantined Linux computer running BitCurator, which is used for the majority of digital forensics work. |
FRED is a digital forensics workstation sold by Digital Intelligence. It has a number of ports, media readers and built-in writeblockers. FRED also has internal RAID storage. This system uses FTK imager software for creating and reading disk images. SCUA has a quarantined FRED system that is primarily used for accessing legacy media. |
SCUA also has external devices to allow for the reading and extraction of other legacy formats. Additionally, SCUA maintains machines with virtual environments and non-longer-supported operating systems for accessing and accessioning content.
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