Born-digital Materials

My job with AV

As graduate assistant, I am responsible for the audiovisual materials of the James Guy Tucker, Jr., Papers. Much of my time for the past year and a half has been spent digitizing audio and video materials, writing metadata, reducing file sizes, and performing quality checks. In addition to the management of audiovisual materials, I have also processed the born-digital materials of the James Guy Tucker, Jr., Papers.

What is Born-Digital?

According to Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Research, “Born-digital resources are items created and managed in the digital form.” Such items include:

• • Digital photographs
  • Documents
  • Websites
  • USB drives
  • Data CDs

The Need for Born-Digital Conservation

As technology advances older forms are forgotten. Abandoned technologies include software, hardware, media (like diskettes), and even file formats. Many outdated media still contain useful information for researchers.  Born-digital conservation strives to preserve this data and make it accessible.

Processing born-digital items involves preserving the data and ensuring access for researchers.

Requirements for Born-Digital Conservation

Born-digital processing requires technical skills and appropriate hardware and software. Amongst other required skills is the ability to troubleshoot issues as they arise.

The Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s (CAHC) Digital Services Lab (DSL) is where the Center’s born-digital processing occurs. The DSL is equipped with two sizes of external floppy drives and a FRED, or Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device. It is able to handle the processing of 3.5” and 5.25” floppy disks, CDs, and more.

Tucker Born-Digital

Tucker held various political roles in Arkansas during 1970s to 1990s. The Jim Guy Tucker's papers contain two sizes of floppy disks, 5.25.” and 3.5.” The 5.25” floppy disk was introduced in 1976, and by the late 1980s, the 3.5” disk was the most popular floppy disk.

Processing Floppies

Using external floppy disk readers and BitCurator software, I captured an image, called a disk image, of the contents of each disk. BitCurator software has quirks and can often be troublesome. The vanishing mouse cursor is my least favorite of these quirks—though spontaneous folder locking and folder disappearances are also frustrating.

A disk image contains a copy of all the information housed on the disk. This image can be browsed without altering the original item and can be used to run reports. Reports can show how many files and what file types are on a disk. Many of these are outdated and cannot be opened on the typical modern computer. Reports also indicate if any files have been deleted from a device.

Additional steps must be taken for files to be accessible outside of BitCurator. For Tucker floppies I converted file formats to PDF and applied optical character recognition, or OCR. I saved these PDFs, along with the initial floppy image, to CDs—so that users could access files and search documents with ease.

Contents of the Jim Guy Floppies

File formats contained on the Tucker floppies include Corel WordPerfect and Bitmap.

The file contents include legislation, drafts of legislation, memos, and personal files from Tucker’s assistants—including resumes and over a hundred recipes. Below is a door sign found amongst Tucker born-digital.

What These Files Tell Us

Born-digital materials contain documents that do not exist on paper in the James Guy Tucker, Jr., Papers, and therefore provide additional information on daily proceedings. These files reveal that many memos passed over Tucker’s desk, and that authoring legislation required many revisions and drafts.

Archival Description of Born-Digital

As born-digital processing is still in its infancy, we at CAHC are finding our way toward a foolproof processing methodology. The born-digital processing will continue to be refined as more materials come through the DSL.

I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to do the born-digital processing for the James Guy Tucker, Jr., Papers. The experience has shown me a whole new aspect of archival work—and offered a sample of its many intricacies.