"Do you have any old floppy disks still lying around in some neglected corner of your house? Do you even know what a floppy disk is? For the uninitiated, floppy disks became commercially available in the 1970s and were used for digital file storage. Now, a new program at the University of Cambridge Library in the U.K. is asking people to bring in their floppy disks so that any digital artifacts on them can be extracted."
"And as part of my role, I look after the transfer service, which is a service that transfers material from a whole wide range of digital carriers. Once I started working on floppy disks, I very quickly realized that they were a lot more complicated than I first thought they were going to be, which basically led to this project and basically setting up a communal place for my community to consult when working with floppy disks."
University of Cambridge Library launched a program inviting the public to submit floppy disks for extraction and preservation of digital artifacts. Leontien Talboom is a technical analyst on the Cambridge digital preservation team and manages the transfer service that migrates material from many digital carriers. Floppy disks were common in the 1970s–1990s and contain personal documents, spreadsheets, games, and research data. Working with floppy disks revealed unexpected technical complexity, prompting creation of a communal consultation resource for handling them. The program has yielded rediscovered files, including documents once belonging to Stephen Hawking, emphasizing the disks' cultural and research value.
Read at www.npr.org
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