Last year I attended the Digital Heritage 2015 conference and presented a paper on digital forensics in the archive. The paper centers on collecting file timestamps across floppy disks into a single timeline to increase intellectual control over the material and to explore the utility of such a timeline for a researcher using the collection.
As I state in the paper, temporal forensic data likely constitutes the majority of forensic information acquired in archival settings, and in most cases this information is gathered inherently through the generation of a disk image While we may expect further use of this data as disk images make their way to researchers as archival objects (and the community’s software, institutional policies and user expectations grow to support it), it is not too soon to explore how temporal forensic data can be used to support discovery and description, particularly in the case of collections with a significant number of digital media.
Many thanks to the organizers of Digital Heritage 2015 for the support and feedback; it was a wonderful and very wide-reaching conference.
Aggregating Temporal Forensic Data Across Archival Digital Media (IEEEXplore) (CU Scholar)
Walker Sampson 