As part of a group project for Dr. Patricia Galloway’s Spring 2012 course, INF 392K, Digital Archiving and Preservation, I contributed to the preservation of the George Sanger Diskettes Collection, a part of the George Sanger Papers in the UT Videogame Archive at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. We received six diskette boxes and seven loose disks from the Briscoe Center, 75 disks in total. Approximately half of them were in double-density disk format, which archivists at the Briscoe Center had been unable to read previously. The remainder were high-density disks. Most of the disks contained sound files or were system backups of Sanger’s working environment in the 1990s. Our work on the collection included:
- Inventorying the disks and recording the metadata on disk and box labels
- Imaging each backup disk, preserving the original bitstream
- Downloading and emulating Norton and Central Point backup softwares using DOSBox, attempting to mount and render each backup disk image
- Preparing the original bitstream, associated metadata, and documentation for ingest into the iSchool’s DSpace and the University of Texas Digital Repository
Read or browse the full documentation from this extensive project:
George Sanger Floppy Diskette Project Documentation
