What Falls Out: Preserving Our Digital Heritage with BitCurator

Unlike their paper counterparts, legacy digital media are increasingly inaccessible as the hardware and software needed to access the data they contain are lost to disrepair, obsolescence and bit rot. Like papers that have slipped between file folders at the bottom of a drawer, these digital objects are frequently "what falls out" as we create, research, record and publish our digital work. Drawing on examples from a number of disciplines, this talk addresses both the need to preserve our increasingly inaccessible digital heritage and how the suite of open source digital forensics tools found in the BitCurator Environment can assist in that process.