Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections

Funding for a new project which I'm very excited about as it gives me a chance to apply some of the ideas in Mechanisms in real-world contexts. Here's the official announcement:

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland is pleased to announce the receipt of an $81,000 award from the Scholarly Communications program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The award will support research for and the writing of a report entitled Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, to be published in fall 2010 by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR); the award will also fund a symposium on the same topic at the University of Maryland in May 2010, at which experts from the cultural heritage sector and computer and information science, as well as practitioners in government, industry, and defense will convene to comment on the report and explore shared interests and practices.

Maryland's work on the report and symposium will be lead by principal investigator Matthew Kirschenbaum (Associate Director of MITH and Associate Professor of English); he will be joined by co-authors Richard Ovenden (Keeper of Special Collections and Associate Director, Bodleian Library, Oxford) and Gabriela Redwine, an archivist and electronic records specialist at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

MITH's director Neil Fraistat comments, "Matt Kirschenbaum's leadership in bibliography, digital forensics, and digital preservation has helped position MITH at the forefront of crucial new work that is reconfiguring archival studies and practices. One of two recent grants from the Mellon Foundation on which MITH will be working in the coming year, Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections allows us to continue fruitful partnerships with the Bodleian Library and the Ransom Center and promises to be a major leap forward for the field."