2015 has been off to a busy start with some traveling and presentations! I won’t go into depth in this post (I will be posting again this week), but I’ve inserted some presentation slides below to give you a sense of things.

Some of the day-to-day in the Digital Forensics Lab. Note: the bottom right image is the estimated time for creating an image of a 5.5 TB drive.

Blake’s Adobe PSD file’s layers

Don Mennerich and I presented at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s  CurateGear 2015 (January 7th).  Videos of the CurateGear short talk  “pitches” are also now available. For those of you unfamiliar with CurateGear, it’s got a very lively format. There are multiple streams; presentations occur simultaneously in different rooms.  Before audience members choose a session, each speaker pitches their talk before the entire audience. Even if you can’t attend all the sessions, then, you get a good sense of the conference sessions.  You’re even encouraged to check out talks during talks. There’s also nothing like seeing a speaker actually demonstrate, in real time before your very eyes, a tool that is in development! I won’t be able to go into much depth in this post, but I advise everyone to keep an eye out for next year’s CurateGear. Some highlights included updates on browser-based emulation (“Emulation as a Service“) practices and some interesting success and failure rates and metric reports from Stanford (checkout slide 3, this slide ) and Emory University. Doug White’s demo, from audio cassette to game executable (“Get off my <strikeout> lawn</strikeout> tapes!”), was particularly cool. Don also presented later that week at the first BitCurator Users Forum 2015 (January 9th).  This was an opportunity for BitCurator users to, among other topics, debate disk imaging target formats for different media and content types, the merits and challenges in student workers handling the imaging of media, and future projects integrating BitCurator in workflows.

Doug White playing games revived from magnetic media

After getting back from Chapel Hill, last week I presented at METRO’s annual conference (January 15th). For those of you that missed this sold out event, check out METRO’s videos, slide decks, and pics from the event.  Almost all of the NYC-NDSR presented together (this was the first group presentation for us, but it won’t be our last). After each of us spoke, we were able to sit with our mentors and talk to interested audience members in the course of two table sessions. It was heartening to hear from a number of interested students and institutions engaging in disk imaging practices. While it was great for me to get updated on the New York community projects,  a surprise announcement put a light damper in the days: METRO’s Executive Director, Jason Kucsma, had resigned.  While I wish him well , the New York archiving community will miss him!

Julia Kim presenting on Jeremy Blake’s work