title: SAVING STAN: Preserving the Digital Artwork of Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski
creators: Taryn Ellis
abstract: It is not unusual to find at-risk obsolete carriers in archival collections, but these 3½ inch ADFS-formatted floppy disks hold original digital artworks from the late career of a pioneering Australian multimedia artist. The graphics files, created on an Acorn Archimedes in the late 80s and early 90s, had not been seen for more than 25 years, and the difficult process of preserving and providing access to these artworks, and their associated software, highlights the fragility of the material from this era. The case study presented here discusses how the State Library of South Australia combined open-source and community software to automate the extraction and migration of obsolete content from these disks while capturing filesystem and other metadata—and discovered that emulation is not always the simplest solution.
keywords: automation migration risc os born digital digital artwork