SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Do you have any old floppy disks still lying around in some neglected corner of your house? Do you even know what a floppy disk is? For the uninitiated, floppy disks became commercially available in the 1970s and were used for digital file storage. Now, a new program at the University of Cambridge Library in the U.K. is asking people to bring in their floppy disks so that any digital artifacts on them can be extracted. Leontien Talboom is a technical analyst with a digital preservation team at the Cambridge University Library. She's involved in this project. Hi, and thanks for coming on the show.
LEONTIEN TALBOOM: Hello.
PFEIFFER: How did this idea come about in the first place?
TALBOOM: I've been working as a technical analyst at Cambridge University Library for the last couple of years. And as part of my role, I look after the transfer service, which is a service that transfers material from a whole wide range of digital carriers. Once I started working on floppy disks, I very quickly realized that they were a lot more complicated than I first thought they were going to be, which basically led to this project and basically setting up a communal place for my community to consult when working with floppy disks.
PFEIFFER: And why do this?
TALBOOM: Why do this? Because floppy disks are part of our cultural heritage. They were very, very popular in the '80s and the '90s. People would have used them for their own personal computing, so people would have written documents on them, created spreadsheets. There's a lot of games that were on floppy disks.
PFEIFFER: You mentioned they might contain research data. I think you said sometimes they have, like, the papers of famous people. Who's a famous person whose papers were at risk because they were trapped on some outdated floppy disk?
TALBOOM: So one of the collections that we hold at the library is the Stephen Hawking Archive.
PFEIFFER: Ah.
TALBOOM: And within that collection, we do have a bunch of floppy disks that he owned and he used on his personal computer.
PFEIFFER: You had an event open to the public recently that had a really funny name. It was called Copy that Floppy.
TALBOOM: (Laughter).
PFEIFFER: Kind of catchy.
TALBOOM: (Laughter).
PFEIFFER: And I understand requests started flowing in. So who came in?
TALBOOM: Yes. We were not expecting that, which was so nice. There were so many people who signed up for it. But yeah. We got a whole wide range of people who came in, and it ranged from people who had family pictures on floppy disks to a lady who brought in a bunch of floppy discs that her dad had written stories on. Her dad had, like, written about family members, but had changed names, and she was just really excited to go back and actually be able to read them (laughter).
PFEIFFER: She wanted to get them off somehow...
TALBOOM: Yes.
PFEIFFER: ...So she could read what her dad wrote.
TALBOOM: Yeah. So that was really nice. We had a person who had written their master's dissertation on a floppy disk and wanted to see it again. Yeah. There was a whole wide range.
PFEIFFER: The idea is that things are kind of trapped on there because they're harder to get off now than they used to be?
TALBOOM: Yes, exactly. So I will always make the comparison with a book, which is, if you've got a book on a shelf and you leave it there for a number of decades, you can take it off the shelf and read it if it's stored in a stable environment, especially like a library. But you leave your floppy disk on a shelf for a number of decades, you can't actually read them anymore. So all our laptops and other pieces of technology, they don't have floppy disk drives attached to them anymore. So yeah. We need special equipment.
PFEIFFER: I have one practical question for you. Floppy disks now seem old-fashioned. We use now flash drives and thumb drives and hard drives. But eventually, those are going to be obsolete.
TALBOOM: Yes.
PFEIFFER: Anything we could be doing now to prepare for that?
TALBOOM: Keep backups (laughter). That's one.
PFEIFFER: But even the backups - even the backups are vulnerable, right?
TALBOOM: Yeah. So if it is something really important to you, try and save it on a number of different devices. That seems to be the best way at the moment to look after stuff. And also, don't keep your digital carriers in garages or lofts, because that seems to be where they...
PFEIFFER: Garages?
TALBOOM: Yeah, garages.
PFEIFFER: Garages or lofts?
TALBOOM: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: Oh. 'Cause they're likely to get wet or damp...
TALBOOM: They get wet...
PFEIFFER: ...Or cold.
TALBOOM: ...Or damp. And they get moldy (laughter).
PFEIFFER: That is great practical advice. Leontien Talboom is a technical analyst with the digital preservation team at the Cambridge University Library. She's helping to preserve the information on floppy disks. Thank you.
TALBOOM: Thank you.
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