Automated Redaction of Private and Personal Data in Collections Toward Responsible Stewardship of Digital Heritage

In order to support digital heritage, collecting institutions must serve as trustworthy and responsible stewards of digital information. This requires not only selecting, acquiring and retaining valuable collections, but also providing appropriate access to their contents. Access provision involves data mediation to provide useful access points, to convey contextual information, and to ensure that private information is protected. Identification and redacting of private information is a significant challenge for collecting institutions providing access to born-digital collections. We describe work in the BitCurator project to provide collecting institutions with reliable, automated software and reporting procedures to address the above issues. Authors Christopher (Cal) Lee is Associate Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His primary area of research is the long-term curation of digital collections. He is particularly interested in the professionalization of this work and the diffusion of existing tools and methods into professional practice. Lee edited and provided several chapters to I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era. He is Principal Investigator of the BitCurator project, which is developing and disseminating open-source digital forensics tools for use by archivists and librarians. Kam Woods is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is currently the Technical Lead on the BitCurator project. Woods received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University, Bloomington and his Bachelors with a special major in Computer Science from Swarthmore College. His research focuses on long-term preservation of born-digital materials; he is interested in interdisciplinary approaches that combine expertise in the areas of archiving, computer science, and digital forensics in enabling and maintaining access to digital objects that are at risk due to obsolescence.