05-30, 15:20–15:30 (Europe/Amsterdam), Hoog vuur
Recovery, FAIRify and open your institutions' legacy data before the experienced researchers and ICT personnel retire, and equipment disappears.
As technology races forward, data stuck in old gadgets like floppy disks and zip drives are at risk of being inaccessible. But even those hidden treasures can be brought back to life. We dove into boxes of floppy disks, zip disks, tape drives, CD-ROMs, and paper to recover as much as possible, making it open and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable), racing against bit rot, and before the researcher retires later this year. Part of our quest was to find the proper working equipment to read these data carriers, spelunking through our equipment storage to find a suitable computer and rescuing a SCSI cable from equipment being taken to recycling. We sought help from the Home Computer Museum in Helmond to source a tape drive and got it working with Ubuntu 22.04... and Windows XP. Fortunately, the researcher had the foresight to include with the printed datasets the corresponding floppy disks or CD-ROMs and backup reams of human-readable and OCR-able data with a machine-readable copy. Analog aerial photographs were also digitized, and georeferenced, to open a historical view of the researcher’s field environments. The researcher has gone through the recovered data and added metadata and documentation. The tools we made to document and read this legacy media have also been published on GitHub. Keywords: Open Science, FAIR Data, ZIP Disks, Floppy Disks, CD-ROMs, Tape Drives, Data Migration, Data Preservation, Legacy data
Data Steward at Geosciences Data Team at Utrecht University
Data Steward at Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University