Of the Importance of Hardware Repositories for Digital Preservation

There are still a significant number of born-digital artefacts which have yet to be received by memory institutions. These include the works of famous or important authors, artists, politicians, and musicians, some of which are stored on digital media dating back 30 years or more. Many digital objects have escaped the blight of bit rot, and legacy hardware, though rare, is still available for reading the media. Assembling the required equipment and expertise is possible but increasingly difficult. This is an ongoing challenge which is not confined to floppy disks or obsolete hard drives. The challenge is exacerbated by the reality that many artefacts are not considered for preservation until the creator has passed away. In addition to the past 30 years’ worth of media, today’s storage media will also soon be superseded with newer technology and form a new challenge for future archivists. In order to preserve the content, or the look and feel of the original objects, precautionary actions must be taken which require both knowledge and the right equipment. Creating disk images from obsolete magnetic media is not a sim- ple task, especially when it concerns more obscure or older formats such as 8-inch disks. There are many challenges to overcome, with each small success leading to a new phase of discovery. In this case study we recount our progress, through many stages, of dealing with the described challenges with regards to a set of 8-inch magnetic floppy disk media. At the beginning of this project, most requirements for recovering the data from this media were unknown: the original hardware system, the original operating system, and the disk format. In this paper, we describe our approach to uncovering this information, leading to a successful preliminary outcome. This is a cautionary tale which aims to provide some lessons for use in related contexts.

iPRES, Kyoto

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