3c. Reformatting Media

If you encounter any born-digital media within personal papers or records (such as floppy disks, zip disks, optical media such as CDs and DVDs, hard disk drives, and flash media), contact Tracy Popp in the Preservation unit to have the media reformatted. Reformatting entails extracting data as encoded on obsolete or vulnerable media in order to make it accessible. Submit the Born Digital Request for Reformatting form and bring the media to Tracy. More information about the content migration service and reformatting process can be found on the Preservation unit’s Born Digital Materials wiki.

There are several actions you will need to take after Tracy images the media and transfers content to the electronic records server, including setting up the folder structure that will later help you arrange and describe the materials as well as extracting technical metadata to get a sense of file types and file organization. The latter is especially important if you are dealing with a large amount of data and many subdirectories nested within directories). You will also want to identify duplicates and sensitive/confidential content to be weeded.

Digital Preservation Coordinator Tracy Popp will create a disk image and migrate the content from the media along with several technical metadata reports to the Unprocessed directory on the storage server: \\storage.library.illinois.edu\UA\UA\Unprocessed. In the Unprocessed folder, the content should be placed in a directory with the seven-digit (numeric) collection identifier from Archon e.g. 1519030 for 15/19/30, in either the New Accessions or Accruals folder. The content transferred from Digital Preservation will generally contain two directories: “Content,” that includes the born-digital files, and another directory called “Documentation,” containing documentation with technical and preservation metadata reports and other information about the accession and or the provenance. The latter may include information about reformatting activities (such as any errors encountered during reformatting and/or content transfer), virus and malware detection and removal, and metadata reports from TreeSize Pro. These files will eventually need to be moved to the pdi folder (see AIP Structure below for more info). You will be working first with the files in the “Content” folder: