It's Krystjana again. I'm back with more information from the AV archives. Recently, my desk was moved to be in the same room as the AV collection. This way I do not have to move the hard drives as far. Also, I finally got the broken hard drives back. So now I'm much busier, frequently switching from transferring drives to writing metadata. Sometimes I even have up to 5 drives transferring at the same time to the two archival ones.
I also got new drives that are 36 TB each. I have already transferred around 50 TB in total, but still have quite a few boxes to go. As I progress through the boxes, I am getting into recent years where the newer drives are so much bigger so I am spending more time on each box. One of the drives I'm currently moving is 11 TB on its own. As a reminder, digital storage media is made up of bytes, from small to large, it goes kilobyte (KB), megabyte (MB), gigabyte (GB), and then terabyte (TB).
Overall I thought I would recap the storage media I have encountered. For media I can transfer, I deal with hard drives, thumb drives, Data DVDs, and Data CDs. I also got to see other media and some that I had never encountered. While I already knew of floppy disks, I also saw Zip Drives, Jaz drives, Dbeta tapes, and DVCPro tapes. For those who do not know, floppy disks were a magnetic storage medium. Zip drives are a type of floppy disk storage. From the 1990s, zip drives could store 100 to 750 MB. Jaz drives are removable hard disk drives that contain a removable cartridge that has hard disks. Jaz drives could store between 1 to 2 GB from the late 1990s. I do not work with Dbeta tapes, or the DVCPro tapes, but it was interesting to learn about them.Beta tapes are also called Betamax. They are a cassette format using magnetic tapes of video tapes. DVCPRO tapes are a video format of digital video that were aimed for the professional market.
I should mention what is stored on all this media, since the main task of my internship is to save the information by transferring it to a new hard drive. I mention boxes, and the boxes refer to projects by Harpers Ferry Center for other National Parks. All the relevant information for a specific project is located in a box labeled with the park abbreviation and the project number. I usually see photographs that are both scanned or digital. There is also music, voice overs, and oral history recordings. For videos, there is raw footage, interviews, timelapses of landscapes, and completed films for Parks. It has been really interesting to see all the different material in the different projects as well as the storage media, and how much the internal storage size has grown over the years.
Agency: National Park Service
Program: Harpers Ferry Center Program
Location: Harpers Ferry Center for Media Services
