The BitCurator project is a joint effort led by the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (SILS) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) to develop a system for collecting professionals that incorporates the functionality of many digital forensics tools.

There are already many cases of self-contained Linux-based packages that bundle many of the tools in order to support digital forensics activities. However, they are not very approachable to library/archives professionals in terms of interface and documentation.

There are two fundamental needs for collecting institutions that are not addressed by software designed for the digital forensics industry: incorporation into the workflow of archives/library ingest and collection management environments, and provision of public access to the data.

The BitCurator project is an effort to build, test, and analyze systems and software for incorporating digital forensics methods into the workflows of a variety of collecting institutions. Two groups of external partners will contribute to this process: a Professional Expert Panel (PEP) of individuals who are at various levels of implementing digital forensics tools and methods in their collecting institution contexts, and a Development Advisory Group (DAG) of individuals who have significant experience with development of software.

BitCurator will define and test support for a digital curation workflow that begins at the point of encountering holdings that reside on removable media—either new acquisitions or materials that are within a repository’s existing holdings—and extends to the point of interaction with an end user. BitCurator will address both client side tools required at the point of initial data extraction and back-end tools for batch processing of disk images, which are likely to reside on a remote server.

BitCurator is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.