About this project

This site was created by Carolina Quezada Meneses, archivist and second-year graduate student in UCLA’s Graduate School of Information Studies, as part of her 2020 winter quarter internship supervised by Elvia Arroyo-Ramírez, Assistant University Archivist at UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections and Archives (SCA). During the internship, Carolina focused on investigating new workflows, tools, and software to preserve, manage, and provide access to SCA’s born-digital material. While contributing to a digital media inventory created to help SCA gain intellectual control of existing born-digital collections, Carolina gravitated towards the Christine Tamblyn papers, which had Macintosh formatted floppy disks and CD-ROMs in need of preservation.

Our approach

The Christine Tamblyn papers contained eight CD-ROMs and one floppy disk:

    • 1 Ada Artemisia Gallery Electronic Catalog 3.5’’ floppy disk

    • 1 She Loves It, She Loves It Not: Women and Technology CD-ROM

    • 1 Mistaken Identities CD-ROM

    • 1 Archival Quality CD-ROM

    • 2 SIGGRAPH ‘96 New Orleans Visual Proceedings CD-ROMs

    • 2 New Voices/New Visions New York competition proceedings CD-ROMs

    • 1 Private/Public Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki exhibit catalog

We created preservation-ready disk images of Tamblyn’s multimedia works from Bilbo, a PowerMac G3 with Macintosh OS 9.2.2. using DiskCopy 6.3.3. Disk images were transferred off Bilbo to a USB drive.

We experimented with multiple emulators with varying degrees of success until we landed on SheepShaver (an open-source Mac OS 9 emulator) that runs on a MacBook Air (2015) with macOS Catalina. Disk images were mounted to the Mac OS 9 emulator and files and content were reviewed.

Of the nine disks, we decided to create screencasts (using QuickTime and soundflower) for the two CD-ROMs showcased on this site as a means of more easily providing access to Tamblyn’s work. The other content, while interesting, were more like research files (such as papers and exhibition catalogues, etc.) than interactive works and were thus left out of the scope of this project.

Christine Tamblyn's third multimedia work, Archival Quality, an autobiographical catalogue of her video art, writings and experiences (finished posthumously by her friends and colleagues in 1998) could not be viewed through the emulator and was left out of this site as a result. We want to acknowledge that this project is still a work in progress and that if given the opportunity, additional resources, and time, we would want to explore looking for ways of providing access to the third CD-ROM.

To learn more about Christine Tamblyn, see the finding aid to her collection here. If you have specific questions about accessing the collection, contact UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections and Archives at spcoll@uci.edu.

To see the screencast videos of Tamblyn's CD-ROMs and other online items from her collection, click here to access the UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections & Archives' digital repository on Calisphere.