Caring for Brooklyn’s Digital History

Erica López, BHS Digital Preservation Fellow, writes about the joys and challenges of preserving legacy media. We experience, understand and interact with Brooklyn’s rich history in so many different shapes and forms. At Brooklyn Historical Society’s Othmer Library, this history is documented in manuscripts, photographs, moving images, oral histories and artifacts. In today’s increasingly digital world, our history can also be found on floppy disks, CDs, hard drives, and smart phones. Digital materials are at risk for a number of reasons, but the biggest risk is obsolescence. For instance, we haven’t had computer drives for floppy disks for many years, and very soon it will be the same for CDs and DVDs. Archivists are thinking about the digital past and the necessary steps to access and preserve what these digital objects can tell us about people’s experiences. We refer to these materials as “born-digital;” in other words, materials that were originally created in an electronic format. This includes material on floppy disks or zip drives, and anything created on your computer that is accessed and saved on its hard drive.
 

BitCurator) allows us to create “disk images” of each digital item. A disk image is essentially a snapshot of all the content on a drive. The disk image allows us to access the files themselves, the file structure, and additional information such as when the file was created and when it was last modified. At the beginning of the project, I thought “why not just make a copy and paste the files? Why go through the very time-consuming and technical process to disk-image a floppy disk, when I could easily just make a copy?” There are many reasons. The biggest is that we risk losing the integrity of the files. For example, if a disk-image was created from an external hard-drive, and the files were just copied and pasted to our computers, then, we would end with many unorganized files. Maintaining the original file structure is like maintaining the page number to a book. Without the page number, all you have is many pages and an incoherent story. The file structure is similar: we are able to view how the creator organized their work. Additionally, by disk-imaging, we are able to collect valuable metadata. For example, we can easily scan a disk-image file for sensitive material, such as credit card numbers and social security numbers. Even more so, we can scan a disk-image for viruses.