Born-digital materials.

In 2011, Ransom Center Digital Archivist Gabriela Redwine, with Assistant Director Megan Barnard, invited an international team of colleagues to engage in a series of conversations about how born-digital materials are acquired and transferred to archival repositories. Ten archivists and curators from the Beinecke Library at Yale University; the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford; the British Library; the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University (MARBL); and the Rubenstein Library at Duke University joined with the Ransom Center to create the report Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories, which offers recommendations to help ensure the physical and intellectual well being of digital media and files during different stages of the acquisition process.…

The report 'Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections' was recently published by the Council on Library and Information Resources

Computer storage media have begun to arrive in archival collections with increasing frequency over the last 20 years. Approximately 50 of the Ransom Center’s holdings contain floppy disks, CDs, or personal computers. Faced with the daunting task of capturing files from these media and making them available to researchers, archivists have begun to investigate fields such as computer science, engineering, and computer forensics for advances that may facilitate this work.

The Ransom Center recently participated in a Mellon-funded project, led by Matthew Kirschenbaum at the University of Maryland, designed to explore the convergences between computer forensics and the preservation of…

Russell Banks’s notes about his early experiences writing on a word processor.

Today it seems, with iPads and hybrid cars and 3-D blockbusters, technology advancements are, quite literally, right in our faces. Almost jaded by the constant onslaught, we expect constant development and easily adapt, rarely finding ourselves bewildered by new devices. This, however, was not always so.

American author Russell Banks’s 1989 novel Affliction, which in early drafts he titled “Dead of Winter,” was his first attempt to construct a work of fiction on a word processor. Used to typewriters or even plain pencil and paper, the word processor, with its editing capabilities such as formatting or spell check, offered a completely new experience.

In a page of typed notes…

The Ransom Center seeks donated computer equipment to help in its digital preservation, access, and outreach efforts. Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

Since the early 1990s, the Ransom Center has been receiving computers, disks, and similar media as part of its manuscript collections. One of the biggest challenges we face when trying to preserve these materials is accessing files that are on older disks.

Some of the items in our collection, such as CDs and DVDs, were created relatively recently and can be read using modern computers. But, to access older types of media—for example, 8-inch and 5.25-inch floppy disks or 3-inch Amstrad disks—we must first find the correct drive or computer.

The Center’s collection includes close to 2,300 disks, as well as personal computers…