All posts by wilcoxl

Considering Literary Archives at the Born-Digital Personal Archives Conference

20th century, 21st century, Digital archives, Event, Humanities, ,

On April 14, 2026, I virtually attended the conference Born-Digital Personal Archives: Status, Projects, and Ethical Questions organised by the National Library of Norway. Conference talks covered a variety of topics, including email and social media archiving, strategies for digital preservation, and processes for documenting the acquisition of born-digital archives. Excitingly, literary archives came up several times at the conference.

Physical literary archives are fruitful for providing insight into authors’ drafting and editing processes, as recent Bodleian exhibitions, such as the 2024–2025 exhibition Write, Cut, Rewrite and the recently closed Tradecraft, have shown. Hybrid and born-digital literary archives will change how scholars engage with writers’ works in pre-publication texts, as archives of physical and born-digital writing reveal or obscure different features of literary works in process. For example, word-processed drafts sometimes obscure editing through the process of typing, whereas manuscript drafts maintain their additions, strikeouts, alternating pen colours, and more. However, word-processed drafts can often be dated and arranged more accurately using metadata than manuscript drafts which are usually undated by the author. Born-digital writing also has the potential to reveal writing processes with extreme specificity: in collaboration with authors, genetic critics are pioneering the use of keystroke loggers to record authors’ writing in real time. The results of this cutting-edge research will eventually make their way into authors’ digital archives, and the ability to do further literary research will be enabled by the work digital archivists do to preserve them.

Kristel Roder of the Swiss National Library shared how born-digital archives are an essential part of the story of the Swiss Literary Archives. In 1991, author Friedrich Dürrenmatt donated his archive, which included over 100 floppy disks, to the Swiss government on the condition that the Swiss Literary Archives be founded. The story of Dürrenmatt’s floppy disks at the SLA is a reminder of a primary challenge of born-digital archives: that oftentimes reading digital data depends on proprietary hardware and software. In Dürrenmatt’s case, the SLA relied on the help of the Swiss army’s cryptology department which had the IBM computers necessary to read his disks and extract the data. Since this initial accession, the SLA has continued to build out its capacity to archive and describe born-digital material with the specific aim of elucidating the literary production process.

In addition to the challenge of proprietary software and hardware, born-digital archives also pose ethical challenges. When an author donates their physical archive, there is a clear boundary to the archive—what is donated constitutes the archives’ maximum extent save for any future accessions. With a digital archive, these boundaries are less clear. Oscar Rüdeberg of the National Library of Sweden discussed the potential of disk imaging to support the reconstruction of writers’ born-digital creative processes through emulation. While this is a clear benefit, disk imaging also uncovers deleted files which donors may not always be aware could be accessible to archivists. Archives must balance the risks and benefits of disk imaging, as well as balance the sometimes-competing wishes of donors and researchers as they pertain to the completeness of digital collections.

Rather than carrying out disk imaging, the Royal Library of Denmark took an unusual but rewarding approach to preserving a born-digital component of the archive of Danish writer Svend Åge Madsen. Madsen used a unique ‘macro-text’ to manage the network of recurring characters and stories which stretched across his various literary works. Acquiring this macro-text required creative thinking on the part of the Library, as it was stored in a fragile 1989 WordPerfect DOS. In addition to using standard digital preservation techniques to archive the macro-text, the Library chose to record a video of Madsen’s computer screen with his own explanation of the system and his working process. This allowed the Library to document and contextualise the structure and function of the macro-text to protect against any limitations imposed by the digital preservation process. Royal Library of Denmark researcher Thomas Hvid Kromann argued that expanded supporting documentation of digital archives, like the macro-text video, will better allow future researchers to critically engage with born-digital literary archives.

At the National Library of Norway’s Born-Digital Personal Archives conference, it was exciting to hear how colleagues in the profession are preparing for born-digital literary archives to become available to researchers and consider what possibilities these archives will provide for cutting-edge literary scholarship into the ways authors’ working processes are being reshaped by technological change.

Takeaways from the Cambridge Future Nostalgia “Copy that Floppy” Workshop

20th century, 21st century, Digital archives, Event, Learning and teaching, ,

The Digital Archivist Trainees had the opportunity to attend the “Copy that Floppy” workshop organised by the Cambridge Future Nostalgia team on October 9, which provided an introduction to floppy disk imaging for digital archivists and digital preservation practitioners. This blog post outlines some of the key takeaways from our experience, and a full guide to floppy disk imaging produced by Future Nostalgia can be found here.

A floppy disk is a type of media which stores data on a magnetic-coated soft plastic disk in a hard plastic case. Popular in the 1970s–1990s, floppy disks come in several sizes: 8-inch, 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch, and sometimes 3-inch. While the number of 8-inch and 5.25-inch floppy disks sold in this period remained relatively stable, the number of 3.5-inch floppy disks sold rose dramatically in the 1990s. The Future Nostalgia team predicts that there will be a significant rise in the number of 3.5-inch disks in future accessions, and therefore creating the capacity to image 3.5-inch disks in particular before this influx should be a priority.

A USB-C cable, a floppy disk drive, a ribbon cable, a controller, a power cable, and 3.5-inch high density disk.
Workstation equipment including a floppy disk drive, ribbon cable, controller, 3.5-inch high density disk, and a power cable. Photo by Leontien Talboom.

Early floppy disks came in single-sided and double-sided formats, meaning that data could be reliably written on only one or both sides of the disks. It is also important to try to identify the “density”, or the way the disk was encoded and magnetised, as this affects how the disk can be read. 3.5-inch double density disks have a hole only in one corner, whereas 3.5-inch high density disks often have two. 5.25-inch disks are more difficult to identify as double or high density, and 8-inch disks are also sometimes single density. The disk manufacturer and type of computer used to write data can also affect the way the disk can be read (e.g., Mac data can be difficult to read on a non-Mac system and vice versa). Common disk manufacturers included Apple, Amstrad, and IBM.

Floppy disk drives that are compatible with the various sizes of floppy disks can be used with a “controller” to read disks on a modern computer. A controller is a piece of hardware that manages the connection between the disk drive and the modern machine, and crucially, it can read “flux-level data” from the disk. (Some 3.5-inch disks can also be read with a USB floppy drive, but these drives cannot read flux-level data, which can help recover some information when a disk is damaged or degraded.) In the workshop, we used a “Greaseweazle”, which is the most commonly used floppy disk controller, that runs with a Python package of the same name.

In teams, we each assembled a workstation to read various sizes of floppy disks. The Future Nostalgia team provided drives, controllers, and cables, as well as some test disks and workshop participants also brought in their own disks that they had been hoping to read. Excitingly, one member of my team brought in a stack of 3-inch Amstrad floppy disks which tend to be rarer than their 3.5-inch counterparts. We used a 26- to 34-pin ribbon cable to connect the 3-inch drive to our controller and a USB-C cable to connect the controller to a PC. The Amstrad drive also required us to use a flipped power cable compatible with an Amstrad drive to connect to an external 12V power source. Luckily, the expert at our table warned us this was necessary―a regular power cable or a power connection directly to the 5V-compatible Greaseweazle would’ve fried the drive or the board!

A floppy disk imaging workstation including a floppy disk drive, power cable, ribbon cable, controller, and laptop.
Setting up a workstation to image 3-inch Amstrad disks.

Despite everything being connected in a way that should have worked, the Greaseweazle software returned unexpected errors when trying to read the disk. Floppy disk drives and cables are fickle and will sometimes work or not work in the same set-up―it’s worth taking things apart, putting them back together, and trying again. Eventually, we discovered that the controller was unhappy with its connection to the ribbon cable and we had to instead connect it to a different port on the same cable. When that was done, the Greaseweazle was satisfied and we were able to image some Amstrad floppy disks! The first step was to take a flux image of the disk and view it using an emulator. From this flux image we were able to tell whether the disk was damaged (fortunately it was in good shape!) and how many tracks were stored on it. We then were able to convert the raw flux image data into a disk image, and extract some of the text files saved on the disk. It turned out that the stack of 3-inch disks contained research notes and bibliographies compiled by an historian of Anglo-Saxon history from whose archive they came.

My colleague Evie’s team ran into one of the most interesting cases of the day, which amassed a small crowd of practitioners looking over her shoulder while she was imaging a disk. Curiously, the flux image kept returning data for only one side of the double-sided disk. The suspicion that we left with was that the user had first written the disk using both sides of a double-sided drive, but had later overwritten data on only one side by using a single-sided drive. Unfortunately, that meant that the oldest data was lost―but it generated a lot of speculation as to how to go about recovering as much as possible. Floppy disks are complicated, and they and the machines needed to read and write them were expensive. Users found creative ways to reuse and reformat disks, which means that sometimes manufacturers’ labels are misleading when imaging disks today. The Future Nostalgia team estimated that they have success imaging disks about 50% of the time due to degradation or damage, so it was an authentic experience not to get complete data off of all of the disks we saw.

Evie using a laptop to image a floppy disk. Several colleagues are looking at her laptop screen.
Evie copying some floppies! Photo by Mark Box.

This workshop was a fantastic crash course into floppy disk imaging, and many thanks to the Future Nostalgia team for inviting us along!