The BitCurator project is a joint effort led by the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities to develop a system for collecting professionals that incorporates the functionality of many digital forensics tools. There are many self-contained Linux-based packages that bundle software tools to support digital forensics activities, but many of them are difficult to use in terms of interface and documentation. The BitCurator project represents an effort to build, test, and analyze systems and software and incorporate digital forensics methods into the workflows of collecting institutions.

BitCurator provides a digital curation workflow that begins at the point of encountering holdings that reside on removable media—either new acquisitions or materials that are within a repository’s existing holdings—and extends to the point of interaction with an end user. BitCurator addresses the tools required at the point of initial data extraction and back-end tools for batch processing of disk images.