Why Archives Need Digital Forensics

Christopher Lee's article "Digital Forensics Meets the Archivist (And They Seem to Like Each Other)"

          More and more archives are having to collect materials that are born digital. Archivists are having to determine the best ways to harvest all of this digital content. Digital forensic practices are tools that can make collecting digital content more efficient and less time consuming. Whenever collecting institutions are dealing with digital content, there is usually a lot of it since there is typically a lot of content on external hard drives. Digital forensics allows for archivists to navigate through digital materials while maintaining provenance, original order and chain of custody. Digital records have multiple levels of representation that range from "aggregations of records all the way down to bits as physically inscribed on a storage medium" as Christopher Lee puts it in his article Digital Forensics Meets the Archivist (And They Seem to Like Each Other). Each of these levels have to be considered when archiving digital content to determine whether or not the information is significant to the record and therefore the collection itself. Information exists in the structures of the computer systems where the materials were made that can be used not only to better understand the content of the materials, but to provide access to more metadata for the record. 

Lee, C. A. (2012). Digital Forensics Meets the Archivist (And They Seem to Like Each Other). Provenance: The Journal Of The Society Of Georgia Archivists, 302-7.

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