Chris,

Thank your for your excellent analysis.

Fynnette Eaton

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 9:54 AM, Chris Halonen <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> There's been a lot of fussing around with recovering floppy-disk content
> in recent years amongst people working in digital archives & digital
> preservation, much of which is "busy work" by people who started their
> careers well after the end of the floppy-disk era & want to have some fun
> playing with archaic/"dead" media. Especially for organizational records
> (personal or family archives are a different matter) I don't think there's
> much evidence of the value or necessity of this work, primarily because
> people don't take a bigger-picture view of the recordkeeping practices of
> the time when the floppies were created.
>
> If the floppies date from the pre-LAN "sneaker-net" era of isolated
> workstations, perhaps even before the era of workstation hard drives, and
> you have good reason to believe the  content was created in common
> office-work using common office applications, you can be sure that the
> floppy disk content was a backup copy of working files or final versions of
> records for which the "official record"/copy-of-record was on paper:
> printed documents or database reports. You can therefore destroy the
> floppies according to your schedules for backups or transitory records.
>
> If the floppies date from the early days of LANs and shared storage on
> servers, the floppy disk content is, again, most likely backup copies of
> files or data for which the organization's electronic record was kept on
> the shared storage, and where, again, the official record was on paper (for
> office documents and reports). Even in large organizations with
> well-established networks, ca.2000 or so, individuals would often keep
> personal backup copies on floppy disk because they didn't trust network
> storage. This lack of faith often wasn't so much a problem with the
> technology as it was a vestigial practice as we transitioned to new
> computing environments. As well, it wasn't unusual to have
> quality-of-service problems with IT staff which encouraged these vestigial
> practices: many lacked client-service skills (they were transitioning, too).
>
> Obviously there will be exceptions, where you know that the only copies of
> important documents, valuable data sets, program source code, or whatever
> are on some floppy disks - unfortunate accidents which do happen -- but if
> you don't know that's the case -- someone's just uncovered a cache of
> inscrutably-labelled floppies in a closet or desk drawer -- then the odds
> are they're just backups or working files and it's a waste of your
> organization's resources to have the content recovered or to even spend
> much time thinking about it. YMMV, but I know that any floppy disks I
> encounter in my organization that were created by admin staff fall into the
> backup/working-file category.
>
> Chris
> _____________________________________
>
> Chris Halonen
> University Records Manager
> Secretariat & Office of General Counsel
> University of Waterloo
> 519-888-4567, ext. 38284
> http://uwaterloo.ca/records-management/
>
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