International Journal of Digital Curation
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The Forensic Curator: Digital Forensics as a Solution to Addressing the Curatorial Challenges Posed by Personal Digital Archives
Get PDFThe 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
The Informatics Transform: Re-Engineering Libraries for the Data Decade
Get PDFIn this paper, Liz Lyon explores how libraries can re-shape to better reflect the requirements and challenges of today’s data-centric research landscape. The Informatics Transform presents five assertions as potential pathways to change, which will help libraries to re-position, re-profile, and re-structure to better address research data management challenges. The paper deconstructs the institutional research lifecycle and describes a portfolio of ten data support services which libraries can deliver to support the research lifecycle phases. Institutional roles and responsibilities for research data management are also unpacked, building on the framework from the earlier Dealing with Data Report. Finally, the paper examines critical capacity and capability challenges and proposes some innovative steps to addressing the significant skills gaps
Digital Forensics Formats: Seeking a Digital Preservation Storage Container Format for Web Archiving
Get PDFIn this paper we discuss archival storage container formats from the point of view of digital curation and preservation, an aspect of preservation overlooked by most other studies. Considering established approaches to data management as our jumping off point, we selected seven container format attributes that are core to the long term accessibility of digital materials. We have labeled these core preservation attributes. These attributes are then used as evaluation criteria to compare storage container formats belonging to five common categories: formats for archiving selected content (e.g. tar, WARC), disk image formats that capture data for recovery or installation (partimage, dd raw image), these two types combined with a selected compression algorithm (e.g. tar+gzip), formats that combine packing and compression (e.g. 7-zip), and forensic file formats for data analysis in criminal investigations (e.g. aff – Advanced Forensic File format). We present a general discussion of the storage container format landscape in terms of the attributes we discuss, and make a direct comparison between the three most promising archival formats: tar, WARC, and aff. We conclude by suggesting the next steps to take the research forward and to validate the observations we have made
The KRDS Benefit Analysis Toolkit: Development and Application
Get PDFThis paper provides an overview of the KRDS Benefit Analysis Toolkit. The Toolkit has been developed to assist curation activities by assessing the benefits associated with the long-term preservation of research data. It builds on the outputs of the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) research projects and consists of two tools: the KRDS Benefits Framework, and the Value-chain and Benefits Impact tool. Each tool consists of a more detailed guide and worksheet(s). Both tools have drawn on partner case studies and previous work on benefits and impact for digital curation and preservation. This experience has provided a series of common examples of generic benefits that are employed in both tools for users to modify or add to as required
Editorial
Get PDFKevin Ashley, Chief Editor, introduces Volume 7, Issue 1 (2012) of the International Journal of Digital Curation
Golden Trail: Retrieving the Data History that Matters from a Comprehensive Provenance Repository
Get PDFExperimental science can be thought of as the exploration of a large research space, in search of a few valuable results. While it is this “Golden Data” that gets published, the history of the exploration is often as valuable to the scientists as some of its outcomes. We envision an e-research infrastructure that is capable of systematically and automatically recording such history – an assumption that holds today for a number of workflow management systems routinely used in e-science. In keeping with our gold rush metaphor, the provenance of a valuable result is a “Golden Trail”. Logically, this represents a detailed account of how the Golden Data was arrived at, and technically it is a sub-graph in the much larger graph of provenance traces that collectively tell the story of the entire research (or of some of it).In this paper we describe a model and architecture for a repository dedicated to storing provenance traces and selectively retrieving Golden Trails from it. As traces from multiple experiments over long periods of time are accommodated, the trails may be sub-graphs of one trace, or they may be the logical representation of a virtual experiment obtained by joining together traces that share common data.The project has been carried out within the Provenance Working Group of the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) NSF project. Ultimately, our longer-term plan is to integrate the provenance repository into the data preservation architecture currently being developed by DataONE
Editorial
Get PDFAlexander Ball, Production Editor, introduces Volume 7, Issue 2 (2012) of the International Journal of Digital Curation
Trends in Use of Scientific Workflows: Insights from a Public Repository and Recommendations for Best Practice
Get PDFScientific workflows are typically used to automate the processing, analysis and management of scientific data. Most scientific workflow programs provide a user-friendly graphical user interface that enables scientists to more easily create and visualize complex workflows that may be comprised of dozens of processing and analytical steps. Furthermore, many workflows provide mechanisms for tracing provenance and methodologies that foster reproducible science. Despite their potential for enabling science, few studies have examined how the process of creating, executing, and sharing workflows can be improved. In order to promote open discourse and access to scientific methods as well as data, we analyzed a wide variety of workflow systems and publicly available workflows on the public repository myExperiment. It is hoped that understanding the usage of workflows and developing a set of recommended best practices will lead to increased contribution of workflows to the public domain
Requirements for Provenance on the Web
Get PDFFrom where did this tweet originate? Was this quote from the New York Times modified? Daily, we rely on data from the Web, but often it is difficult or impossible to determine where it came from or how it was produced. This lack of provenance is particularly evident when people and systems deal with Web information or with any environment where information comes from sources of varying quality. Provenance is not captured pervasively in information systems. There are major technical, social, and economic impediments that stand in the way of using provenance effectively. This paper synthesizes requirements for provenance on the Web for a number of dimensions, focusing on three key aspects of provenance: the content of provenance, the management of provenance records, and the uses of provenance information. To illustrate these requirements, we use three synthesized scenarios that encompass provenance problems faced by Web users today
Freedom of Information in the UK and its Implications for Research in the Higher Education Sector
Get PDFFreedom of information legislation came into effect in the UK in 2005. All universities that receive block grants from the Higher Education Funding Councils in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are subject to the legislation. Recent cases where universities have received requests for data and other information generated by researchers, working in areas such as climate, have given rise to controversy and widespread concern in the research community. This paper examines some of those concerns, relating to responsibilities for the ownership and holding of information, for data and records management, and for the handling of requests under the legislation. It also considers the implications relating to personal data, and to information that may affect the commercial interests of universities operating in a competitive environment, or the interests of the many other organisations which may be involved in research partnerships with universities; and it outlines concerns about the possible impact on quality assurance, peer review, and scholarly discourse. Finally, the paper emphasises the need for support and training for researchers so that they become more aware of the legislation and its implications, and how to deal with requests when they arise