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BitCurator:

Beyond Environment

Brian Dietz | bjdietz@ncsu.edu | @diuhtez

Digital Program Librarian for Special Collections

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The Wizard
The Shift
The Beyond

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CONTEXT

from the PASCAL-Context Dataset

But first, of course, some helpful context:

NCSU has been designing our current approach to born digital (BD) for about 5 years, and it’s been in production for about 4.
It’s a co-owned space between:

Me. I manage the the technical aspects of the work and am the immediate supervisor of work
And Linda Sellars, Head of Technical Services, who advises on issues related to arrangement and description

We also have an advisory group including representatives of researcher services and curators.
The digital program is housed within special collections, which makes communication rather easy.
We collaborate closely with a department of web application developers.
Processors are a combination of graduate students working exclusively on born digital and processors of work mostly on physical materials.
Our goal is to have a standard set of workflows that are accessible to folks who aren’t well-versed in digital archiving.

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The Wizard

MELT WIZARD (from “Big”)

Enter DAEV, our processing wizard.
DAEV stands for Digital Assets of Enduring Value.
It’s a locally built tool:

It includes a Ruby on Rails back end and an Angular.js front end,
Workflows are defined in a YAML file,
With instructional text is contained in a set of Markdown files.

DAEV does four things:

Guides processor through a session, providing explicit instructions on actions to take,
records processor actions and generates preservation metadata,
manages archival packages, including creating a package manifest,
Associates a processing session with an ArchivesSpace archival object record and writes DAOs to ArchivesSpace and associates it with the AO record.

We recently re-architected DAEV to conform with our new processing environment and new workflows where we’ve switched from a strictly media-based set of workflows to one that considers the media type as well as content contained on the media. Before, for instance, all optical and USB media were imaged, but now we do so only if there’s a compelling reason to do so.
Before going on, I wanted to acknowledge the work of several people, including:

Trevor Thornton, the developer and maintainer of DAEV,
Jason Evans Groth who contributed to DAEV’s inception and design, and
Several processors and testers and documenters, including Cathy Dorin Black, Jessica Rayman, and Erin Gallagher

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CLI

Outside of ArchivesSpace and descriptive work, while processing media, most of our work is done at the command line (the exception being the KryoFlux GUI).
This provides an efficient processing environment while increasing the comfort level for processors of working at a command line.
Processors determine the media type and workflow, which includes analyzing media and content characteristics
DAEV provides the commands that are copied and pasted into a command prompt
This approach:

Provides simpler documentation and processes while still being explicit about actions being taken.
It’s more efficient than GUIs.
And, in some cases, there’s more control over what’s being done.

There are several points where processors provide information to DAEV to be used in the session-based creation of commands, through the use of variables.

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sudo ddrescue -n -v /dev/disk{{ disk_number }} {{ uuid }}.dd {{ uuid }}.logfile

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How’s it Working Out?

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II. The Shift

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Windows + BC VM --> Mac

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Base machine

+Nix

-Cygwin

-Linux

-VM/Dual Boot

Mac!

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Managing the Mac:

Mostly Homebrew

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III. The Beyond?

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Forensic Interventions

“As cultural heritage institutions borrow and adapt forensic techniques…”

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Intersections

Processing environment
BCAW and NLP
Consortium
Users Forum
Google group
People

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A Big Tent

Bolete fungi, Bernard Spragg, Public Domain

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Thanks!

Brian Dietz

bjdietz@ncsu.edu