Relevant materials are also listed here in the syllabus for the class on Born-Digital Materials we teach (almost) every summer at the Rare Book School. (Christine, I heard you speak at the BL a while back; we should add your excellent links): http://www.rarebookschool.org/reading/libraries/l95/ Nonetheless, despite this body of material and a good deal more that's not listed there, someone of Cerf's stature can still make news just by pointing to the problem. The closest thing to a counter-example is the recent publicity the Internet Archive has gotten for its vintage software and game libraries, accessible via in-browser emulation: https://archive.org/details/software For those who work with storage media themselves, see also BitCurator: http://www.bitcurator.net BitCurator is a Linux distribution packaging a number of open source digital forensics tools, most of them aimed at disk image acquisition and analysis. Best, Matt On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 9:59 AM, Christine Finn <christine.finn@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
Good to see this is being discussed. It's a bit ancient in itself, but I talked about excavating hard drives, and the issue of how to read old data, in a chapter in Artifacts: an archaeologist's year in Silicon Valley (MIT Press 2001).
There's a related paper, which I gave with Sellam Ismail at a computer and tech conf in Vienna that year: 'The Valley of Lost Data: Excavating Hard Drives and Floppy Discs'.
It should be archived in proceedings online
http://www.vintage.org/content.php?id=004
The issue of lost data has preoccupied computer collectors for a long while. and I celebrate their forward-thinking in a chapter on Silicon Valley in the Oxford Handbook to the Archaeology of the Contemporary World (OUP, 2013) eds Harrison, Graves-Brown, Piccini.
I also talk about it in a 4-episode BBC Radio 3 doc series, "It"s Big and it's Beautiful" about the rise of retro tech. It should be out there somewhere - on bit torrent?
And the issue of lost manuscripts, especially with regard to writing future biographies, in a programme on BBC Radio 4, "Tales from the Digital Archive"http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010m9sw
all best, Christine
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