The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS) received a $456,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support its work in digital forensics.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS) received a $456,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support its work in digital forensics.
Digital forensics is “the process of identifying, preserving, analyzing and presenting digital evidence in a manner that is legally acceptable.”
Because materials are now predominantly created electronically, collecting institutions have great opportunities to acquire and preserve resources developed throughout the creative process. To seize these opportunities, information professionals must be prepared to extract digital materials from removable media in ways that preserve their integrity and reflect their provenance and chain of custody. They must also support and mediate appropriate access – allowing users to make sense of materials and understand their context, while preventing inadvertent disclosure of sensitive data.
BitCurator is a partnership between SILS and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland to develop, distribute and integrate open source forensic software tools to manage and preserve digital archives. The grant will support the second phase of BitCurator.
“The first phase of BitCurator has been quite successful in developing tools, engaging with relevant professional communities and disseminating associated information,” said Christopher (Cal) Lee, associate professor at SILS and principal investigator of the project. “The activities planned for phase 2 will be vital to advancing the ultimate BitCurator goals of professional capacity building, outreach and sustainability of related development activities. We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their vision and continued support for what we feel is an imperative building block in our growing digital world.”
As a part of the transition to this second phase, the BitCurator project team is seeking a person for a community lead position who will help build an active user community, promote the work and provide expert support to users.
For more information about the BitCurator project, visit bitcurator.net or follow @bitcurator on Twitter. For more about the community lead position, visit https://ejobs.umd.edu/postings/17167.
School of Information and Library Science contact: Wanda Monroe, (919) 843-8337, wmonroe@email.unc.edu,