Niamh Murphy is the Digital Preservation Librarian at University College Dublin.
This World Digital Preservation Day, with the theme Save our Stories (SOS): Our Digital Heritage in Danger, I’m highlighting an ongoing digital preservation project with UCD Archives to recover material from 163 floppy disks deposited as part of the papers of novelist and travel writer Joseph Hone (1937–2016).
Joseph Hone had a multifaceted career. He worked for a time with the Egyptian Ministry of Education in Cairo, Heliopolis and Suez, before moving into publishing, radio and television. In 1960, he became co-founder of Envoy Productions, Dublin, and co- produced a number of plays and musicals at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, East London. In 1968, he was appointed Radio and Television Officer with the United Nations Secretariat in New York, and in the following two years, he travelled to Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, India, Pakistan and the Far East, producing documentary programmes based on his travels.
Hone began writing novels in the 1970s and is perhaps best known for a series of spy novels featuring the character Peter Marlow, a British spy. His work was favourably compared with that of writers such as Len Deighton, Eric Ambler and John le Carré.
Among the material held on the 3.5-inch floppy disks are drafts for an unfinished novel and a second memoir that Hone was working on before his death. His first memoir, Wicked Little Joe (2009), offered a fascinating account of his life and illuminated a unique cultural moment in Ireland. The potential recovery of a second memoir presents an opportunity to preserve and bring to light further significant aspects of his personal and literary history.
So, how do we give these digital records the best possible chance of survival?
My approach involves using a Greaseweazle device to capture the raw magnetic flux stream from each disk. This is achieved by connecting a compatible floppy disk drive to the Greaseweazle device and issuing a read command through the command line. The resulting capture records the magnetic transitions encountered during the reading process, without initially attempting to interpret them as sectors, files or a filesystem.
The accompanying screenshot of HxC Floppy Emulator software illustrates the process of interpretation and analysis. Using HxC to visualise the reconstructed disk structure allows me to examine the number of tracks, sides and sectors. This information helps to identify an appropriate format profile for interpreting the captured data, which informs the subsequent migration from the raw flux stream to a disk image. During this process, the captured magnetic information is decoded and organised into a representation of the disk's logical contents.
It’s worth noting that the transition from flux capture to disk image requires an understanding of the disk's format, rather than simply converting the captured data into a generic image file.
The resulting disk image can then be supplied to a legacy operating-system emulator, enabling the recovered material to be explored within a compatible environment, one that is closer to that in which it was originally created.
The accompanying screenshot of Infinite Mac illustrates the use of a browser-based emulator to examine the digital files within an appropriate environment.
The workflow has been informed by Leontien Talboom’s Future Nostalgia project with Cambridge University, alongside the community-developed Copy That Floppy! guide and Yann Serra's Greaseweazle tutorial. These resources have been invaluable in developing an approach to recovering the material held on the floppy disks in this collection, demonstrating the importance of collaboration and knowledge-sharing within the digital preservation community.
There is also an important conservation element to this work, as the physical condition of the media plays a significant role in determining whether successful recovery is possible. Before capture, I am carefully cleaning the floppy disks using appropriate materials and techniques, recognising that the physical condition of the media is an important consideration in any recovery attempt.
This project marks an important milestone for UCD Archives, representing the first time the Archives has actively engaged in the digital preservation of born-digital material.
A special thank you to Kate Manning, for providing valuable contextual information about the collection, to Julia Poirier, for sharing her conservation expertise and guidance on cleaning the floppy disks, and to Leontien Talboom, for sharing her considerable knowledge of floppy disks and for her continued contributions to the digital preservation community through her workshops at No Time To Wait, iPRES and the National Library of Ireland. Their contributions have been invaluable to this work.
Happy World Digital Preservation Day everyone!