Virus checking is an established process in most pre-ingest digital preservation workflows. It is typically included as part of a general threat model response and there has to date been relatively little research into the virus checking function specifically within a long term context. The British Library recently began a small research project to explore this issue, using data from a legacy digital collection established by the ‘Flashback’ project and supplementary data provided by the UK Web Archive. Our poster presents this research and findings to date, raising questions about the overhead of virus checking at scale, when organizations should virus-check content, and the legacy capabilities of anti-virus software.
Event title
iPRES 2019 - 16th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects
