This has been a wild month for the BitCurator project here at MITH. First of all, as the grant funded portion of the BitCurator project has drawn to a close, we have established a member-based consortium to be the ongoing home of the BitCurator environment. The BitCurator Consortium (BCC) will be a member-led organization to pick up where the grant funded portion of BitCurator left off. In my conversations with BitCurator users I like to emphasize this point: the BitCurator project has not ended just because the grant period is over. Far from it! The outreach, training, and other community engagement efforts of the BitCurator team over the last year have established an active and growing user base who are committed to the ongoing development of the BitCurator environment. What’s more, both UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and MITH are charter members of the BitCurator Consortium and will continue to be actively engaged in the project. You can learn more about the consortium and see a list of member organizations who have already joined the BCC here on the BitCurator Consortium page of the BitCurator website.
In addition to the establishment of the BCC, we were proud to announce the release of BitCurator 1.0 last week. This is a major milestone for us and represents the culmination of three years of dedicated development work. The BitCurator 1.0 release includes a major update to the BitCurator Disk Image Access tool–a tool that allows users to view the full content of a disk image, including hidden and deleted files, and export those files to a directory. Other recent updates include a revised safe mounting tool that allows users to mount disks in read only mode, the inclusion of the Library of Congress’s Bagger tool, and an updated version of bulk_extractor. To learn more and to download the latest version of BitCurator, please visit our wiki at wiki.bitcurator.net.
As the BitCurator Community Lead over the past year, it has been my pleasure to get to know the members of this community and learn about the challenges they face as they begin processing their born-digital collections. It has been rewarding to see the adoption of the BitCurator environment as an important part of addressing those issues and to see the BitCurator community take a leadership role in this area. I look forward to seeing both the BitCurator environment and the BitCurator community grow and develop as we take this next and necessary step in the maturation of the BitCurator project.