*Do nothing much while awaiting the miraculous invention of universal guidelines for rapidly decaying technologies scattered all over the map.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html?sudsredirect=true
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Though computers have been commonly used for more than two decades, archives from writers who used them are just beginning to make their way into collections. Last week, for instance, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, announced that it had bought the archive of David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008. Emory opened an exhibition of its Rushdie collection in February, and last year, not long before his death, John Updike sent 50 5 ¼-inch floppy disks to the Houghton Library at Harvard.
Leslie Morris, a curator at the Houghton Library, said, “We don’t really have any methodology as of yet” to process born-digital material. “We just store the disks in our climate-controlled stacks, and we’re hoping for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines,” she added.
Among the challenges facing libraries: hiring computer-savvy archivists to catalog material; acquiring the equipment and expertise to decipher, transfer and gain access to data stored on obsolete technologies like floppy disks; guarding against accidental alterations or deletions of digital files; and figuring out how to organize access in a way that’s useful.
At Emory, Mr. Rushdie’s outdated computers presented archivists with a choice: simply save the contents of files or try to also salvage the look and organization of those early files. Because of Emory’s particular interest in the impact of technology on the creative process, Naomi Nelson, the university’s interim director of Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, said that the archivists decided to try to recreate Mr. Rushdie’s writing experience and the original computer environment.
Mr. Rushdie started using a computer only when the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa drove him underground. ...
