If you ever come across an old floppy disk, be careful how you hold it and what you place against it. We’ve found a number of cases where putting a smartphone or tablet against a floppy disk …

The new do-it-yourself space launches this Saturday.

By Brian Dietz This post is the third in a bloggERS series about access to born-digital materials. Over the last three years, the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) at NCSU Libraries has un…

DriveSavers had to write special software to read the disks written with a custom OS.

Over the past 20 years, many thousands of CD-ROM titles were published; many of these have lasting cultural significance, yet present a difficult challenge for libraries due to obsolescence of the supporting software and hardware, and the consequent decline in the technical knowledge required to support them. The current trend appears to be one of abandonment – for example, the Indiana University Libraries no longer maintain machines capable of accessing early CD-ROM titles.In previous work, we proposed an access model based upon networked ‘virtual collections’ of CD-ROMs which can enable consortia of libraries to pool the technical expertise necessary to provide continued access to such materials for a geographically sparse base of patrons, who may have limited technical knowledge.In this paper, we extend this idea to CD-ROMs designed to operate on ‘classic’ Macintosh systems with an extensive case study – the catalog of the Voyager Company publications, which was the first major innovator in interactive CD-ROMs. The work described includes emulator extensions to support obsolete CD formats and to enable networked access to the virtual collection.

Strongly held opinions about the proper method to wipe data from hard drives reflect bygone eras. Learn about disk wiping for modern platter hard drives, and securing data on solid-state drives.

By Elena Colon-Marrero and Allison Hughes On October 14, 2014, Princeton University announced it had acquired the papers of author, emeritus faculty member, and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. The pa…

Changing with the times as the world moves from paper to digital, the Harvard Library has adopted forensic techniques to save material stored on obsolete formats.

Bentley Historical Library Curation Team The Bentley Historical Library's Mellon-funded ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration project (2014-2016) united three Open Source platforms for more efficient creation and reuse of metadata and to streamline the ingest of digital archives.  We continue to explore innovative archival practice and emerging technologies to curate our collections—read all about it here!

Excellent intro to digital forensics for archives/libraries, with a great "so what?" slide.

When Kathleen O’Neill talks about digital collections, she slips effortlessly into the info-tech language that software engineers, librarians, archivists and other information technology professionals use to communicate with each other.  O’Neill, a senior archives specialist in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, speaks with authority about topics such as file signatures, hex editors and checksums even […]