Beginning of this year we reported on first results of a joint Archives New Zealand and University of Freiburg data recovery project of a set of 5.25 inch floppy disks from the early 1990s. After recovering the raw bitstreams from the floppy disks with a special hardware device the resulting image files were sent over to Freiburg for further analysis. After being able to establish the file lists contained on each floppy it is possible now to extract single files.

Archives New Zealand and the University of Freiburg are cooperating on a data recovery project. The archive received a set of 5.25 inch floppy disks from the early 1990s that contained records of a public organization dating back to the mid 1980s. These floppies were not readable in standard X86 machines with a 5,25 inch floppy drive attached to it.

Following up on the idea of system imaging or “snapshotting” discussed in a previous post and presented at this year’s iPRES 2011, a general concept of long-term sustainable computer systems could emerge.

The typical reading room computer in libraries, archives and often museums is equipped with a way for patrons to search and browse the institutions catalogues and digital collections. The digital collections are often rather restricted by the systems to making accessible only a few of today’s multimedia formats and documents types (for example PDF, jpeg and a few audio or video formats).

Digital objects are often more complex than their common perception as individual files or small sets of files. Standard digital preservation methods can lose important parts, or the context of digital objects. Interestingly enough thousands of miles apart Maurice van den Dobbelsteen (The Netherlands) and Euan Cochrane (New Zealand) simultaneously proposed a new approach to cope with the special requirements of their National Archives in dealing with the different types of complex objects.

Emulation services for direct user access often require more effort than simply providing the appropriate emulator and system image. Usually, the average visitor to memory institutions is not familiar with past computer architectures and their operating function. Thus, our goal is to research different approaches to creating automated access to the different digital artefacts users may request. The research surrounding emulation as an access strategy is progressing.