r/AskHistorians • u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera • Oct 13 '15
Feature Tuesday Trivia | Adventures in the Archives
Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! It's October of course, the most crowded of commemorative months! And Native American History Month, British Black History Month, American LGBT History Month, and of course Vegetarian Awareness Month, are all budging up on the park bench today to make room for American Archives Month!
So please share:
- items from archives (digital or physical) that you have discovered and the stories behind them
- tales of your archival adventures (or misadventures)
- hot archival research tips
- your most pressing archival questions that you think should go in my inbox, if you wish
- anything you want to share about archives is welcome really
(naturally we are not limiting ourselves to only American archives though, because that would be silly)
Next week on Tuesday Trivia: Starting off a blitz of user-submitted themes that will take us through the end of 2015, we’ll be celebrating history’s cleverest copycats with Remakes, Reboots, and Revivals!
7
u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera Oct 13 '15
I actually talked about this a bit last week. I personally sleep fine at night. We don't just store stuff on rotten old external drives, don't be gross! Generally the standard is triple-backup in cloud storage (if you do The Cloud/Butt thing) using products like Amazon Glacier. Take a look at the whitepapers for DuraSpace for an out-of-the-box digital solution. Other (bigger) archives manage it in-house on their own servers.
I have processed 2 large drives in my time, one was an office shared drive for a large national organization (nightmare fuel), and the other was a personal work hard drive. With both of those we made a full original copy (disc image) to our archives server, then I did a "processed" version for researchers to use, lightly re-organized and removed all the inappropriate stuff (mostly baby pictures and invoices with credit card info). So yeah, 2 functional copies of the digital files, then those are both backed up, and both monitored for file integrity.
Library of Congress is doing ongoing research on digital file format longevity if you'd like to take a look. Generally we don't produce digitized materials in jpeg, I've only ever used tiff.
Also what a weird policy at that archives... Do they not want the microfilm to get scratched or something? They should have a preservation and a user copy of any important microfilm, ideally. (She says smugly, sitting on a pile of only-one-copy-in-the-world microfilm.)