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If you ever come across an old floppy disk, be careful how you hold it and what you place against it. We’ve found a number of cases where putting a smartphone or tablet against a floppy disk will erase the data stored inside.
The Media Preservation Site at Indiana University – Bloomington (IUB) makes its message plain and clear the moment you first set your eyes on it: “Our History is At Risk.” Home to at least 3 million media objects, including sound and moving image recordings, photos, documents, and artifacts, IUB has come to grips with the issue at hand: a great deal of their heritage is locked within obsolete electronic and analog playback formats for sound and moving images. And they’re doing something about it.
In an era where music is downloaded, synced, and played back wirelessly, the writing is on the wall for most physical containers of digital media, and MiniDisc could be among the first of many types of this physical media to go obsolete in the near future.
On July 7, Sony announced that production of MiniDisc playback equipment would cease in September, with the manufacturing of blank media to end approximately one year later. Soon to be gone, it shouldn’t be forgotten, as MiniDisc is a valuable case study in the effect of format wars, and how adoption of a medium can be hampered by Digital Rights Management and poor business decisions.
If you have any Kodachrome Film stashed away, the last days to get it developed are at hand. December 31, 2010 is the last day Dwayne’s Photo will process Kodachrome, shutting down the last commercial processing plant for the film.
The New York Times today published an article that reflects some of the challenges of preserving born digital content – that is, documents, data and other content that has been created digitally, on a computer or electronic device, and for which there is no physical original (such as on paper). In particular, they highlight the […]