Over the weekend, Matt Kirschenbaum and I traveled to UNC Chapel Hill in order to meet with the BitCurator Development Advisory Group (DAG). By design, our meeting with the DAG coincided with Curate Gear, a UNC Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Sciences sponsored conference designed to bring together scholars, software developers, and archivists to discuss tools and on-going research focused on the unique challenges of digital curation. Curate Gear was very informative, and showed the need for effective tools to deal with the ever-growing collection of digital artifacts archiving institutions collect daily. Attending the Curate Gear talks and demos emphasized to me just how immediate the problem of digital curation is. It is not, as they say, academic.
One of the DAG members, Dr. William Underwood, who also presented at Curate Gear spoke of his work with the George H.W. Bush presidential library and their need to process an extensive collection of existing floppy diskettes. Yes, that’s right, we’re still trying to work through the first Bush administration’s digital records from twenty years ago. This is just one of the many examples at Curate Gear of how pressing this issue is. And not just in academia, the challenge of archiving and making digital records available affects businesses, government agencies, lending libraries and private collections. Think even briefly about the amount of data that now sits unprocessed in shoe boxes in library storage, and you’ll immediately see the need for projects such as BitCurator.
The next day we walked from the hotel across the UNC campus on a surprisingly warm and sunny morning (at least compared to Maryland) to begin the day-long meeting with the DAG members. What struck me from the beginning was just how engaged and invested the DAG members were. Even as Cal Lee (BitCurator PI and professor at SILS) introduced BitCurator to the group, we began to receive valuable feedback and insights into both the software development process and the particular challenges we might face with the BitCurator project. Professor Geoffrey Brown of Indiana University, for example, offered incisive comments on the importance of maintaining a tight focus on the specific set of problems BitCurator is designed to address. Other DAG members were likewise generous with their comments, which lead to extensive discussions on a range of topics that included:
- The role of BitCurator in a broader ecology of digital archiving tools
- Properly scoping the project so that it will be able to deliver on the objectives laid out in the design documentation
- Defining the intended user base for BitCurator
- GUI and command line interfaces
- Identifying and sequestering private or otherwise sensitive data during the curation process
- Education and documentation requirements
- Outreach and long-term support for the BitCurator project
Again, I was impressed with the interest and engagement in BitCurator, which in my opinion went beyond professional courtesy (though there was that in spades) and demonstrated the very real need for this project. Put another way, BitCurator is a tool that the DAG members want to succeed not simply as a matter of academic curiosity, but because they want to be able to put it to use themselves.
Going forward the BitCurator team will revise the design documents based on the DAG members’ feedback and then begin the development process. One of the key tasks ahead is building a corpus of “real world” archive materials against which we can test BitCurator. As Matt observed at one point, there are any number of DH tools that look and sound promising, yet languish on (the digital equivalent of) dusty shelves because they either don’t actually address the intended user’s problems or because nobody knows of them. Part of my job, then, will be to make sure that we get more than just good ideas out of the DAG members; we’ll need their bits, too.