command line interfacing via the Bash shell, GNU/Linux and BSD utilities). Anecdotally, the majority of our students have come into the program as Mac users, and are therefore already familiar with using Apple hardware.Īlso, MIAP’s digital preservation/literacy instruction (as with the fields of digital preservation and open source software development at large) is currently favored toward Unix environments (i.e. The HardwareĪpple hardware has a proven durability – the MIAP media lab houses a fleet of legacy/leftover Mac laptops and desktops stretching back to PowerBooks and a Macintosh SE that are (knock on wood) largely still functional. Thanks to all those who offered feedback to that initial request, or have inspired these choices via many other professional tasks and avenues. What follows is a detailed break-down of each component of these machines: hardware, operating system, and software (both graphical and command line), along with, if prudent, what each program does and why it was selected. When applicable I’ll link out so you can download or investigate each component yourself and your needs (probably less broad than mine). What would the foundation for all this look like? What programs would you install to educate and demonstrate a wide variety of digital preservation and administration tasks: disk imaging, metadata extraction, metadata manipulation and transformation, digital forensics, file transfer and packaging, fixity management, on and on… while minimizing the time spent installing and managing software later on?įreeware preferred, GUIs or CLI tasks likely to include demo-ing metadata extraction/manipulation/management, disk imaging (2/2) They might also be used for workshops, like my own Talking Tech series, or for other invited guest speakers. ![]() Perhaps even more excitingly (for me, anyway), I had the chance to design, from the ground-up, what a “MIAP laptop” should look like – a laptop that, from startup, would be of use to our students in even vaguely digital-related courses… which, yes, is all of them, but especially: Metadata, Digital Literacy, Handling Complex Media, or Digital Preservation. So, in addition to the MacBook Pros already there, we had the chance to add eight more laptops to this supply. So I ultimately viewed these three computers as a sort of pilot program, justifying a larger fleet of similar laptops that could potentially serve an entire class of 10 or 11 students at the same time (our usual cohort size) rather than just three people. These were, I think, quite a bit of success, and these laptops continue to be used on the regular. These were intended, less for forensics really, and more as a general purpose resource – for MIAP students to use in any course, say, if they forgot their own laptop at home, or their own laptop was having difficulty during a hands-on lab exercise. But besides breathing new life into some of our existing workflows, this project also presented an exciting new opportunity.įor the past couple of years, we’d had three contemporary (~2013) MacBook Pro laptops available in our digital forensics lab. This was excellent news – our video digitization stations were not the only piece of equipment that had started lagging a bit and creating choke points around archival projects. Early this summer, the department learned a development proposal we had submitted to improve MIAP’s computer hardware was successfully funded.
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