Posts

Showing posts from August, 2013

A short detective story involving 5 ¼ inch floppy disks

Image
Earlier this year my colleague encountered two small boxes of 5 ¼ inch floppy disks buried within the Marks and Gran archive in the strongrooms of the Borthwick Institute. He had been performing an audit of audio visual material in our care and came across these in an unlisted archive. This was exciting to me as I had not worked with this media before. As a digital archivist I had often encountered 3  ½  inch floppies but not their larger (and floppier) precursors. The story and detective work that follows, took us firmly into the realm of ‘digital archaeology’. Digital archaeology:   “ The process of reclaiming digital information that has been damaged or become unusable due to technological obsolescence of formats and/or media ” (definition from  Glossaurus ) Marks and Gran were a writing duo who wrote the scripts of many TV sitcoms from the late 1970's on-wards. ‘Birds of a Feather’ was the one that I remember watching myself in the 80’s and 90's but their credits include m