Background

DANNNG started as a small group of practitioners meeting, somewhat informally, with the original goal to investigate the Advanced Forensic Framework 4 (AFF4) as an alternative to capturing physical disk images. The conversation evolved over time as we invited more people that we personally knew to join the discussion.

As the particulars of when and how to create a disk image have always been something of a hot topic for digital archives practitioners, we decided to submit a presentation proposal to a practitioner-focused conference: the BitCurator Users Forum 2020. AFF4 was a different perspective on this discussion that we thought would be valuable to present on, however, as we started developing our proposal idea, we found that our conversations instead kept coming back to developing a decision tree that offered factors to consider when deciding how to transfer archival data from a donor to the archives.

So that's what we initially set out to write: a document that spotlights various considerations that archivists can use to determine whether it's most appropriate to create and retain a disk image. Once we had a draft, we acknowledged that it reflected the perspectives of our small, non-diverse group composed of members from relatively well-resourced research libraries.

To remediate this, we opened our resources to the community to review, critique, and help develop our first draft into a true community-generated resource. We developed a process by which we gathered, reviewed, and incorporated community input and feedback, and what emerged was a resource that better reflected the needs and diversity of the cultural heritage community.

Moving forward, we strive to broaden the perspectives reflected in the group as well as to continue to develop resources that would be of interest to our professional community.

Get Involved

We warmly welcome new members and encourage anyone who is interested in our work. If you have a project that you think aligns with DANNNG and its work, join us! Sign up for our announcement listserv to be alerted of upcoming meetings. Our Community Agreement governs our work.