This workshop is a hands-on workshop for first-time conference attendees and experienced practitioners. It covers the steps in a Digital Curation workflow, and how and why the selected tools are important for and used in the workflow. There will ideally be at least 3 facilitators (availability still pending), limited to approximately 3 hours and 15-20 participants.
The workshop will begin by going over the steps (Phases and Stages) of a Digital Curation workflow in which the author has experience (est. 30 minutes).
These include:
- Collect (Acquisition and transfer)
- Describe (Arrangement and Description)
- Preserve (Pre-ingest / ingest)
- Access (Store, manage, discover)
The workshop provide a series of hands-on activities relating to the significance and use of the tools listed below:
- Exiftool. Est. 30 minutes duration
- DROID and PRONOM. Est. 20 minutes duration
- Hexadecimal editors eg. HxD. Est. 30 minute duration
- Bagger and the BagIt structure. Est. 25 minutes duration

Discussion will focus on how others have or hope to resolve workflow and tool issues. Includes how funding, staffing and organisational size can introduce workflow limitations for some.
By the end of this workshop, participants should:
- Understand key steps in Digital Curation workflows, how and why different tools are useful.
- Develop an understanding of how to do the following tasks:
o File format identification and characterisation.
o How to use Exiftool, DROID and PRONOM to analyse, describe and prepare acquisitions for preservation.
o Use of Hexadecimal editors to identify and correct files via internal signatures.
o Potential ways to package material into Submission Information Packages (SIPs) for digital preservation systems.
- Understanding common issues participants have faced or may face using these tools and how to solve them
- Understanding of purpose and utility of disk imaging compared to file transfer