Beyond the workflow: archivists' aspirations for digital curation practices.

The documentation of archival workflows plays an important role in digital curation practice. Capturing the various steps, tools, people, and software involved at different stages, workflow documentation visually represents complex activities, and at times, invisible labor. In this article, we reflect on findings from the OSSArcFlow project, a three-year, grant-funded initiative to investigate and document workflow activities of 12 cultural heritage institutions using three open-source software systems. Building on previously published research on documentation of current digital curation practices, this article reflects on the challenges the project team encountered in modeling archivists' aspirations for their workflows. While current practices could be accurately represented in linear process models, archivists' aspirations for how they might advance digital curation practices extended beyond adding or changing discrete workflow steps and often involved sociotechnical factors that could not be easily mapped. This article presents a taxonomy of archivists' aspirations for their born-digital archives, grouping these goals together around major themes that emerged throughout the research. Our findings show that workflow documentation is an essential artifact in helping archivists to understand gaps and challenges in their current workflows and to imagine the further development of digital curation tools, systems, and practices. Project participants especially benefited from engaging in this reflection on workflow documentation as part of a community of practitioners, with the opportunity to compare across institutional contexts.

Navigating Unmountable Media with the Digital Forensics XML File System.

Some computer storage is non-navigable by current general-purpose computers. This could be because of obsolete interface software, or a more specialized storage system lacking widespread support. These storage systems may contain artifacts of great cultural, historical, or technical significance, but implementing compatible interfaces may be beyond available resources. We developed the DFXML File System (DFXMLFS) to enable navigation of arbitrary storage systems that fulfill a minimum feature set of the POSIX file system standard. Our approach advocates for a two-step workflow that separates parsing the storage's file system structures from navigating the storage like a contemporary file system, including file contents. The parse extracts essential file system metadata, serializing to Digital Forensics XML for later consumption as a read-only file system.