Born Digital Buddies: Looking Outside of the Library for Answers

Since we began our born digital strategic initiative at NCSU Libraries we have been confronted with puzzlement about the project (why would anyone want anything on a floppy disk?) to fetishism (if it's on a floppy disk it HAS to be worth looking at!) but, mostly, "I haven't used a disk like that in xx years," which implies "how could anyone even do anything with that disk?" When personal computing became affordable in the 1980s, a multitude of differently sized storage formats were available. Floppy disks of 5.25", and especially 3.5" (the drives for which were not uncommon to see in computers until the early 2000s) were especially ubiquitous. One could buy them at local computer stores or KMart. They were not only a handy portable data format but they were, for many, the only way to store data on a personal computer until hard drives became standard.

Unfortunately for the academy, libraries, and other repositories of knowledge, the demands of research and the responsibilities of keeping technology up to date has done to disk drives and other storage media that contains the work of our past what thousands of consumers did with their turntables at the dawn of the digital music era - the machines have been surplussed, donated, or simply left to rot, while the needs of current production are met. The disks themselves are put in a box on a shelf in an office, and the idea that they were once our only means of storage becomes a faint memory. IT departments, focusing on the demands of their clients, move on to what's new, and what was in the past becomes unsupported. No more 3.5" floppy drives are in computer labs. If you see a 5.25" disk drive in the hallway of a library you might assume it's being donated to a museum.

But outside of the halls of the academy is a flourishing trade of people who never let those particular bits die or who actively want them to be seen again. The Software Preservation Society , for example, is responsible for the Kryoflux , a common and robust tool that allows modern computers to control older disk drives and capture the information as a disk image that can then more easily be read in a modern environment. According to their website, the group " dedicates itself to the preservation of software for the future, namely classic games." The Kryoflux is well-known in digital forensics, despite it having been apparently developed to play old Amiga games. It's ability to read low-level data helps in deciphering even the most difficult disks. Other devices, like Device Side Data's FC5025 , were created for the same reason. One of the earliest announcements on their website from January 27th, 2007, says "attendees to this electronics and ham radio swap meet were invited to bring disks and have image copies made."

The device the NCSU Special Collections Research Center has employed for its processing of born digital items that come as 5.25" and 3.5" disks is called the Supercard Pro . Like the Kryoflux, the Supercard Pro was designed by a video game enthusiast - Jim Drew - to move the bits from his Commodore systems into the future.  Unlike those who assume this kind of technology is lost and gone forever, the Supercard Pro and Jim Drew are positive examples for those working on born digital programs that there are alternatives to online retailers and typical university vendors. [Update: We were using the HxC Floppy Emulator to transcode the SCP file to a raw disk image. However, in our experience, it did not have adequate support for Apple-formatted disks. The HxC converter software forum administrator says "The HxC software already supports Apple DOS sector exporting & importing. However the library DPLL parameters must be tweaked to analyze the Apple stream correctly." The Libraries is attempting to provide him with the appropriate streams to support this development. -Brian Dietz, 02-17-2016]

Dorothy Waugh of Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) has spoken of reaching out to the retrocomputing community in Atlanta for answers to her questions about legacy equipment. This model, in concert with the knowledge that these devices and this expertise is out there, should be a ray of hope that, so long as we're paying attention, the work can be done to find sustainable and efficient methods to deal with what many consider to be forgotten technology. While it may be more difficult to use Craigslist or eBay as a vendor in a university environment, a quick scan of both will net a multitude of hits for equipment - and potentially even human expertise behind the email addresses of sellers - that can bring this so-called dead material back to life. So the question is, then, how do we start tapping into these non-traditional marketplaces for the equipment we need.

Like the recent resurgence of vinyl records (which, contrary to popular belief, never stopped being created even when compact discs took over the market), legacy storage formats and devices have never truly left the market, either. Manufacturers still produce inexpensive 3.5" USB floppy drives (which aren't perfect), but based on the massive amount of drives and other computer equipment used heavily for thirty years, it's not difficult to find better versions of what you need, it may just mean looking in alternative places. Floppy disk drives are not rare, they are just not on a Best Buy shelf anymore. As evidenced by the gamers that have propagated the use of legacy drives for the betterment of the digital forensics computing, there are plenty of people who want that equipment to tap into the data of years past. We aren't going to, any time soon, revert to floppy drives as a practical storage solution, but knowing there are ubiquitous ways to take this legacy data - all 1s and 0s, just like today's today's data - and bring it forward into a hard drive environment means that sustainable born digital programs, with some practice, persistence, and a lot of flexibility, can be attained.