Are you an instructor who is concerned about the impact of high textbook costs for your students’ academic success? WVU Libraries will host a virtual Open Textbook Workshop and Textbook Review on March 9 at 10 a.m. that will help instructors explore possible open textbook solutions to this growing financial issue.
Click here to complete an application. Registration deadline is Friday.
Written byElizabeth James, the Digital Archivist at the West Virginia & Regional History Center.
What kind of items come to mind when you think of archives or archival materials? What about digital archives? When it comes to digital archival materials, many people will think about scanned copies of physical materials like books or maybe even web pages saved to a platform like the Internet Archive. But there are many more formats in WVU’s archives: from 3.5 inch floppy disks to Zip disks to CDs, contemporary archives contain all of these material types and more. These media formats contain what are known as born-digital materials, or materials that were originally created digitally.
Sometimes the labels on items are a little bit less than helpful.
In this post, I’ll take you through the journey of one seemingly familiar format through the typical procedures used in the WVRHC to remove content from the original media and make born-digital archival materials accessible.
Let’s meet our protagonist for the day: the compact disc, or CD, a format first introduced to the commercial market for music in 1982. Though CDs are still common, when it comes to any media formats you need the following two things in order to access the content:
Have equipment to read the item—for instance, if you have a 3.5 inch floppy disk, you need a 3.5 inch floppy disk drive.
Have software to read the files saved on the item—if you have a Word Perfect file from 1992, that file is designed to display correctly using the 1992 Word Perfect program.
For CDs, external USB drives and internal disc drives are still accessible. I have an internal and external disc drive I like to use with CDs and DVDs I’m processing. Since we have the equipment to read the item, let’s get started! This example uses a CD found in the International Association for Identification Collection at the West Virginia & Regional History Center.
Though I couldn’t tell until I inserted the disc, this CD is a data CD which means that the CD contains non-audio content. To access the files, I need to open the CD on my computer using Windows Explorer rather than having any audio or music files play automatically. On the left you can see the view if you use this approach. However, CDs can have multiple file systems underneath what you see in this basic view. On the right is the view you see when using IsoBuster, a software that supports a more digital forensics style approach to examining files. In this view, you can see multiple file systems that each tell your computer’s operating system how to access the files on the CD. Multiple file systems may contain different files, so we want to make sure we check to see that we grab all of the unique files.
Comparison of visible files in IsoBuster and Windows Explorer.
Luckily, these two file systems contain the same files, so we’re safe to use a software like Teracopy that will copy these materials off the CD without modifying any of the files or file metadata, a term archives and libraries use to talk about information that describes the files. After all, we can’t party like it’s 1999 if we unintentionally edit the files and change the “Date Modified” to 2023. By using Teracopy, which retains the original file metadata and ensures that we don’t accidentally edit the file along the way, we can assure researchers that what they’re accessing in the archive is as close to what the original creator saved to the CD as possible.
Now we can move on to step two: determining if we have the software to access the files. Upon looking at this content, I discovered the CD was a front for something unexpected: a floppy disk! The files on the CD were a copy of materials found on a floppy disk in the collection. All of the files on the CD are dated to 1999, which is conveniently the title of a catchy Prince song and the inspiration for this article title. We can see that the files are Microsoft Word-based, albeit Word 97, which means that opening the files in a modern version of Word should be fine.
Content of CD in Windows Explorer.
But what’s on the disc? Well, it’s an unpublished history of identification and the International Association of Identification by Carey Chapman. We have several versions of this manuscript across both printed materials and floppy disks, which means that any researcher can examine these versions to gain a sense of what Chapman’s writing process was like. You can see some of the floppy disks where this content came from below. If the number of disks seems like a lot, remember that floppy disks can only hold 1.44MB of information. To give you a sense of scale: a 2GB thumb drive holds 1,422 times as much content as a single floppy disk.
Original Carey Chapman floppy disks. All of the content on these floppy disks are on the CD.
Let’s up the difficulty level and go to :
Russian disk
Time taken: 20~ minutes
If I wanted to conclusively say I had tried every avenue, I would use something like a Kryoflux that reads every available bit, even floppy disks with issues. While I might use this approach in the future, this floppy disk seemingly contains a translation of a document and the content of the disk isn’t vital to understanding the collection.
Getting content off this CD was comparatively easy. For other materials, I’ve had to do everything from emulate MS-DOS to see the contents of a program, trawl the internet for 5.25-inch floppy disk drives, to doing research on what type of computers and operating systems the United States Senate was using in the 1990s. Suffice to say, digital archives work takes many forms. Though the digital materials in this collection are still being processed, you can reach out to Elizabeth James, Digital Archivist, at elizabeth.james1@mail.wvu.edu if you have any questions about accessing this item or anything I’ve written about here.
Nieman will return to campus to read from her latest novel, “In the Lonely Backwater,” recipient of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, North Carolina’s top prize for fiction, and other of her works of prose and poetry.
“Valerie Nieman is a dynamic figure in the vibrant literary history and landscape of West Virginia,” Humanities Center Director Renee Nicholson said. “It’s really an honor to be part of the celebration of her archive.”
Louise McNeill was the Poet Laureate for West Virginia, 1979-1993 and was once told by renowned poet and writer Jesse Stuart, regarding her writing talent, “… you have genius in you.” Most, if not all, who have enjoyed her prose agree.
McNeill was born and raised in Buckeye, Pocahontas County, West Virginia on a farm situated above Swago Crick. “This patch of earth” had been in the McNeill family since 1769 and was all Louise knew until she went out into the world. However, her passion for family and the history of her people’s mountain land, always flows through her lyrical works linking the “long tides of the past” with the love of home, known as “a place called solid.”
Louise believed her poetic gift came from her grandfather, “Capt. Jim.” She grew up hearing the stories of Capt. Jim, describing him as a verse-writing, hard-set, rebel soldier. James McNeill was a Confederate officer during the Civil War and was captured at the Battle of Droop Mt. in Pocahontas County, November 1863. He spent the rest of the war as a POW at Fort Delaware.
Fort Delaware during the Civil War
While in prison, Capt. Jim promised himself if he got out alive he would go home to Swago Crick, clear the fields, and build a new house under Bridger’s gap. He also wrote in a little brown notebook several love poems, death poems and a lengthy pose called “Virginia Land.” Released at war’s end, Capt. Jim walked back to Swago and set to.
Long after Capt. Jim died, Louise’s father gave the notebook to her which she never knew existed. Later Louise would publish the poems adding biographical information about the captain, drawing from the stories she heard as a child. She never personally knew her grandfather, he died two months after her birth. But then there was the passing. As Louise tells it, “When he was going out the door of life, I was coming in, as we passed each other he gave me his pencil stub.”
Pages from Capt. Jim’s prison notebook,
From A&M 3201- Louise McNeill Papers, West Virginia & Regional History Center, WVU Libraries.
The exhibit includes Moretz’s work alongside zero-waste designs by students in her fashion design management course. Moretz, associate professor of Fashion, Dress & Merchandising in the Davis College, won the 2022 Art in the Libraries Faculty Exhibit Award.
Instead of one organized gathering for volunteers to revise content on Wikipedia posts, participants are encouraged to set their own schedules to edit pages over the 31-day span. To cap off the month-long initiative, the Downtown Library will host an in-person editing event on Thursday, March 30, from 1-5 p.m.
As part of its mission, the Art in the Libraries Committee wants to highlight the art and scholarship of WVU graduate students. The Committee invites current graduate students to submit ideas for consideration for an exhibit to visually showcase their scholarship in new and experimental ways.
These can present a visual evolution of their work, visualize their research and influences, or answer a research question. Proposals should be based on their academic or creative research and lend themselves to visual interpretation with Library consultation.
“The goals of these awards are to provide a multidisciplinary platform for deeper learning, foster intellectual discourse and discussion and demonstrate the breadth of WVU’s creative and innovative activity,” Libraries Exhibit Coordinator Sally Brown said.
As part of West Virginia UniversityLibraries’Art in the Libraries series of exhibits of personal collections, Frankie Tack, Clinical Associate Professor in Counseling and Well-Being, shares a selection of the most common tool in the world, the hammer, in a display at Evansdale Library.
Tack’s collection of over 100 hammers ranges from a pre-colonial Native American hammer stone to hammers used by jewelers, cobblers, coopers, clockmakers, blacksmiths, masons, shipwrights, farriers, and even cigar smokers and, of course, an array of standard claw hammers from the 19th century to present.
The collection began when Tack came into possession of her father-in-law’s tools after his death. He was a farmer and a loom fixer in textiles when we still had those plants in the U.S. The collection, she soon found, also included his father’s tools.
The Art in the Libraries Committee and Dean of Libraries Karen Diaz selected Lilly Adkins, a junior double majoring in painting and sculpture, and Kieah Hamric, a sophomore majoring in graphic design, to receive the 2022 Dean of Libraries’ Student Arts Award.
Lilly Adkins
Adkins won for her work titled “Detroit Fox Theater 1934 to 2022.” This mixed media painting compares the same area, nearly 100 years apart, emerging from times of turmoil.
A Sensory Safe Space opened this semester on the Downtown Library’s first floor. The space is comprised of low-lighting, soft seating, plants, and wall-hangings meant to soften the space. Additionally, users can check out noise-cancelling headphones and personal white noise machines. The space is not reservable and is open to students, faculty and staff.
The project is the result of planning and work by the Downtown Library Access Services Team for the Libraries’ Development Day. A huge thank you goes to team members Hilary Fredette, Andrea McDaniel, Hattie Murphy, Savannah Owens, Sam Rahall, and James Shaver.
In conjunction with its “Indigenous Appalachia” exhibit, WVU Libraries welcomes everyone to attend a virtual panel with five artists featured in the exhibit Friday, Jan. 27, at noon.
“Indigenous Appalachia,” currently on display in the Downtown Library, is designed to increase awareness of the contributions of Indigenous Appalachians to the region’s shared history and present while also recognizing continuing injustices faced by Indigenous people.
The panel will include Nadema Agard (Cherokee/Powhatan), painting; Connor Alexander (Cherokee) game design; Erin Lee Antonak (Oneida), sculpture/drawing; April Branham (Monacan), painting/photography; and Ethan Brown (Pamunkey) gourd design/painting. The event will be moderated by Sally Brown, WVU Libraries exhibits coordinator and the exhibit’s lead curator.
