Fees: Advance / Regular*
SAA Members: $339 / $399
Employees of SAA Member Institutions: $379 / $439
Nonmembers: $465 / $489
Course Description
(2 days, 1.5 CEUs, 10 ARCs, 1 DAS)
Are you starting to receive disks as parts of collections or have you discovered disks in boxes of paper records? Caring for the records stored on removable storage media (e.g., floppy disks, hard drives, thumb drives, memory sticks, and CDs) requires archivists to extract whatever useful information resides on the medium while avoiding the accidental alteration of data or metadata. In this course, you’ll learn how to apply existing digital forensics methods and tools in order to recover, preserve, and ultimately provide access to born-digital records. We’ll explore the layers of hardware and software that allow bitstreams on digital media to be read as files, the roles and relationships of these layers, and tools and techniques for ensuring the completeness and evidential value of data. We’ll apply digital forensics tools and methods to test data in order to illustrate how and why they are used.
Note: This course includes exercises with open-source tools in the BitCurator environment. BitCurator is distributed both as a virtual machine and as an installable ISO image.
Students must bring a laptop to the course with the following software already installed. (All software programs are free.) iPads and other tablet devices will NOT be able to perform the hands-on tasks, as these devices do not have adequate resources or allow the level of user control required to run the associated software.
Upon completion of this course, you'll be able to:
- Explain the roles and relationships between the main layers of technology required to read a string of bits off of a physical storage medium and treat it as a file
- Identify various forms of data that may be "hidden" on the physical storage medium
- Use write blockers and create disk images in order to prevent accidental manipulation of volatile data
- Identify and extract the data that a file system uses to manage files
- Apply digital forensics tools and methods to collections of records
- Identify and compare alternative strategies for providing public access to data from disk images
Who Should Attend?: Archivists, manuscript curators, librarians, and others who are responsible for acquiring or transferring collections of digital materials, particularly those that are received on removable media
What You Should Already Know: Participants are expected to know basic archival practice and have intermediate knowledge of computers and digital records management.
This course builds on others in the Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) curriculum, including Basic Electronic Records, Thinking Digital, Accessioning and Ingest of Electronic Records, and Metadata Overview for Archivists.
Attendance is limited to 35.
* Register for both Digital Forensics for Archivists: Fundamentals and Digital Forensics for Archivists: Advanced and save!
SAA Member $514 / $634
Employees of Member Institutions $584 / $704
Nonmember $700 / $764
