![]() “It's now quite common in library and archive settings.” Creating forensic copies of the data was a relatively fringe idea 8 or 10 years ago, Lee says. Institutions working to decipher collections have the same need, although in their case, the object is to maintain the provenance of the original for future researchers. They can then preserve the integrity of the original for evidentiary purposes in court while doing all their forensic analysis on a perfect copy. So digital-forensics practitioners have developed techniques for creating an artefact-free 'disk image' that duplicates everything, down to the unused and hidden disk space. This is often harder than it sounds: almost anything done on a computer, even something as innocuous as plugging in a USB drive, leaves a faint digital trace. In law enforcement, for example, a top priority is to preserve material in its original form. And many of their solutions were directly applicable to the archivists' needs. “It turned out that law-enforcement and computer-security people were dealing with essentially the same problems of stabilizing and recovering data from digital media,” says Matthew Kirschenbaum at the University of Maryland in College Park. Increasingly, archivists are finding inspiration in the field of digital forensics: the art of extracting evidence about illicit activity from computer drives, smartphones, tablets or even GPS devices. By now, many libraries, archives and museums have accumulated shelves full of such material, stashed away in the hope that if it's ever needed, somebody, somewhere will be able to figure out how to access it. “This includes floppies, Zip disks, CDs, DVDs, flash drives, hard drives and a variety of other media.” Many files can be accessed only with long-obsolete hardware, and all are subject to physical deterioration that will ultimately make them unreadable by any means. “People around the world have information stored on disks that are less readable with every passing day,” says Christopher Lee, a researcher in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Chapel Hill. So how do archivists recover and preserve what's left behind? ![]() The Gould papers were an early indication of an issue that's been rapidly worsening: four decades after the personal-computer revolution brought word processing and number crunching to the desktop, the first generation of early adopters is retiring or dying. “We had some challenges finding old applications to figure out what word processor he used, that sort of thing,” says Olson. “He used a lot of early word processing for his writing, lots of disks and diskettes in different formats.”Īfter considerable effort the Stanford archivists did get Gould's papers into order - first by finding hardware that could read the obsolete disks, and then by deciphering what they found there. “It was a large collection, as you can imagine,” says Michael Olson, service manager for the Born Digital/Forensics Lab at Stanford University Libraries. Many of the 'papers' were actually on computer disks of various kinds, in the form of 52 megabytes of data spread across more than 1,100 files - all from long-outdated systems. When archivists at California's Stanford University received the collected papers of the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould in 2004, they knew right away they had a problem.
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