Today is World Digital Preservation Day!

Today we celebrate World Digital Preservation Day, which occurs on the first Thursday of every November. The day is meant to celebrate digital preservation and raise awareness of the challenges inherent in the task of recording human memory that exists in a digital format.

An interesting case for digital preservation exists in the Charles Furlong papers (Mss-197). Charles Wellington Furlong was the first American to explore the southernmost part of the Americas, the interior of Tierra del Fuego, in 1907 and 1908; we've blogged about him before. While there, he made wax cylinder recordings of the Onas and Yahgan peoples talking and singing. Obviously, there is no easy way to play a 100+ year old wax cylinder recording in the modern world. Even if there was, it is possible that the fragile, decaying media would only have one play left before it disintegrates, so one had better be prepared to capture the audio when it is being played. There is also a chance that the attempt at playing the item would destroy it before any audio could be heard.

Instead of potentially damaging the wax cylinders by playing them, we sent them to a specialist who digitized the recordings by taking extremely-high resolution photographs of the cylinders using a laser, and then played the digital file from the high-resolution digital images! Although the audio quality is scratchy and echoey, the recordings can now be heard.

The digital files for this collection include hundreds of files, including exotic file formats like .bri (used for 3-D modeling) and .trk files (used for workflows tied to proprietary and unique software packages). However, the images of the cylinders are also saved as more accessible .jpg and .tif files while the audio recordings are also available as .mp3 files. We have made all of the files, like this one for example, available online to researchers. The files are checked for viruses, re-built from scratch (in a process called recharacterization), and given a checksum by Preservica, our digital preservation system, which also synchronizes the files with our description system. 

In honor of World Digital Preservation Day, a lighthearted look at the world of intangible zeroes and ones is available by way of a physical object: a photocopied zine! They are available at Rauner Special Collections, the circulation and welcome desks of Baker-Berry library, and the Book Arts Workshop. If you'd like to examine an actual wax cylinder, come to Rauner and ask to see one from the Charles Furlong papers (Mss-197).