Technical metadata generator for digital audio and video. Among other things, gives you codec and container info.

Dorothy Waugh Over the last year, archivists at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) processed thirty-seven 3.5” floppy disks included amongst the papers of writer…

Wiki of digital media (carriers), how to identify them, and possibilities for reading them.

This is meant to be a quick overview and primer of the flippy disk and disk hardware situation with regards to 5.25″ floppy drives. It is for reference and referral by others for an easy unde…

‘The world’s most intriguing documents now lie comatose inside a 1995-ish laptop… ’

Professor Donald Emmerson from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies found seven 5.25 floppy disks containing files created using WordPerfect 5.1 under MS DOS 3.3 in 1992 and 1993. Dave Sare at the Institute posted " Professor needs to convert old files SOLUTION" in the expert partners mailing list and thereafter we are connected.

The growth of computing technology during the previous three decades has resulted in a large amount of content being created in digital form. As their creators retire or pass away, an increasing number of personal data collections, in the form of digital media and complete computer systems, are being offered to the academic institutional archive. For the digital curator or archivist, the handling and processing of such digital material represents a considerable challenge, requiring development of new processes and procedures. This paper outlines how digital forensic methods, developed by the law enforcement and legal community, may be applied by academic digital archives. It goes on to describe the strategic and practical decisions that should be made to introduce forensic methods within an existing curatorial infrastructure and how different techniques, such as forensic hashing, timeline analysis and data carving, may be used to collect information of a greater breadth and scope than may be gathered through manual activities.

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Basically, it's really hard. Putting confidential data on SSDs is therefore demonstrably unwise. THIS GOES FOR USB STICKS TOO.

Getting stuff off CDs.

D-Lib Magazine

An all-in-one digital-forensics hardware unit. Not cheap, but reasonable for what it does.

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Libraries, archives, and museums are acquiring increasing numbers of born-digital collections. I’ve been interested to see the increased use of digital forensics tools in the appraisal and processing and accessing of such collections. But there are challenges. Some of the software tools come from the realm of legal forensics, where chain of custody and recovery […]