Practical Digital Forensics at Accession for Born-Digital Institutional Records

Code4Lib Journal, Issue 31

2016 January

Abstract

Archivists have developed a consensus that forensic disk imaging is the easiest and most effective way to preserve the authenticity and integrity of born-digital materials. Yet, disk imaging also has the potential to conflict with the needs of institutional archives – particularly those governed by public records laws. An alternative possibility is to systematically employ digital forensics tools during accession to acquire a limited amount of contextual metadata from filesystems. This paper will discuss the development of a desktop application that enables records creators to transfer digital records while employing basic digital forensics tools records’ native computing environment to gather record-events from NTFS filesystems.