Presentation to Archiving 2015 that outlines recent developments with Stanford Born-Digital Forensics Labs. The focus of the recent efforts to systematize our lab work and demonstrate our value to Stanford University.

1. Boutique to Production – Stanford’s Born-
Digital /Forensics Labs (BDFLs)
Michael Olson
IS&T, 2015

2. Topics
 History of our lab
 Boutique to Production created by incremental
improvements in:
 Service Model - Digitization as a Service
 Budget
 Standardization of Equipment
 Documentation / Statistics

3. History
 Our call to action – British Library Risk Assessment
 McLeod, Rory, “Risk Assessment; using a risk based approach to
prioritise hand held digital information”
 Losing 3 % of hand held media / year
 30,000 pieces of KNOWN at risk media in
Stanford’s collections

4. History
 Our call to action – British Library Risk Assessment
 30,000 pieces of KNOWN at risk media in
Stanford’s collections
 Began 2009 – six years old
 One-time funding to buy workstations, no staff, no
workflow,
Assorted data tapes from Stanford collections

5. Hard drive from Dennis Brain collection
5 ¼” floppy disk
CD-ROM from Robert Creeley collection

6. History
 One-time funding to buy two workstations, no staff,
no workflow
 Began 2008 – seven years old
 AIMS grant archivist hired in early 2010 to begin
determining workflows for born-digital materials

7. Out with the Old – in with the New
 2012 reimagining how we deliver digitization at
Stanford Libraries
 Includes all of our service arms:
 Digital Production Group
 Stanford Media Preservation Lab
 Born-Digital / Forensics Labs

8. Digitization Services
 Mission– why we digitize
 Services – what we do and how to access these
services

9. Digitization Services

10. Digitization Services
 Internal wiki that describes in how to request
digitization services in detail
 Prioritization and tracking of requests using JIRA
 Created custom templates in JIRA to:
 Request lab services
 Assign and track the work
 Create transparency on our work and its value

12. Budget
 2014 – improve budget process
 Track anticipated and actual expenditures
 Forecast expenditures:
 Workstations (new and replacement cycle)
 Other hardware components
 Consumables
 Contracts / Maintenance agreements
 Hourly staffing
 Travel

13. Standardization of Equipment / Configurations
 Currently have 2 Forensic Recovery of Evidence
Devices (F.R.E.D.s) and 7 workstations
 Goal to reduce lab maintenance respoinsibiliities
of our digital archivist
 Replace custom built workstations with commodity
workstations
 Create disk images of workstations

14. Documentation
 Production requires functional documentation:
 Lab mission and charter
 Meeting agendas and notes
 Goals
 Equipment inventories
 Budget
 Procedural documentation or how to do certain tasks

15. Documentation

16. Statistics
 Estimate the cost of the preserving data from
legacy media formats
 Identification of potential process improvements /
efficiencies
 Statistics provide the data points to enable
demonstration of program value

18. Statistics
 What we’re tracking:
 Collection call number
 Media type
 Quantity of media
 Failure rate by media type
 Total number of files
 Size (GB) of preserved content
 Operator responsible for capture
 Quality control
 Time to do the work

19. Conclusion
Transition to Production required:
 Clearly defined and documented service model
 Budget
 Functional Documentation
 Statistics to document program value

20. Questions?
Michael Olson
mgolson@stanford.edu
(650) 308 6538