There are three types of portable storage media commonly used here: diskettes (often called floppies), CD, and USB or flash drives. Diskettes are an old format: they hold little, fail easily, and the quality control, both on diskettes and the drives they use, has really gone south. Stop using these! CD’s come in two flavors “Read only” and “Read/Write”. Files written to a “Read only” CD end up on a medium with a nicely archival feeling, since they cannot be overwritten and edited. But “Read Only” is not much use if you want to modify a file later. “Read write” is more flexible. I tend to think use of CD’s as storage media has peaked, though, because of USB/flash drives. Also called “dongles” and “key drives,” these devices plug into a USB port on your computer (usually on the front of the CPU) and in most cases, proceed to map themselves to a drive letter. To use a USB/flash drive, plug it in, wait while some popups keep you informed, and, when it’s ready for use (it’ll tell you), open it as a folder not unlike the way you opened the two Novell folders above.
USB/flash drives rule because they have the capacity of hundreds or thousands of diskettes, they are built to be rugged, and they are extremely portable. They’re getting less expensive all the time too. They aren’t that hard to lose, though, so if your files are important, they are still much safer on a Novell drive – yours or a share drive.
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I hope all students of the Library sciences take at least one class outside their intended sphere of interest. Mine was 'Archiving of Audio-Visual Material.' There was much coolness--Edison wax discs, holding the very first "Morning Edition" mag. recording in my hands (!), watching Sesame Street reruns. But one thing that really blew me away was this: The most reliable media for audio recording is the vinyl disk. CD is 'archival' as long as it's "pressed" rather than recorded via CD-R or worse—CD-RW. While there is much back-and-forth about just what will last, we really don't know yet--The technology’s just too new (less than 30 years, no?)
I have no clue whether the diskette I have labeled 'Thesis Backup' from 1990 is workable--I don't have the technology to read a MacWrite II file. My Mac doesn't even HAVE a floppy drive on it. From an archival point-of-view, this is pretty pathetic/scary. Are we losing historical and intellectual continuity through platform changes? We SAY we can retrieve these files later, but do we really even try? LCPL used to have an Information & Referral “database” (or, as the hipsters say these days, “Research and Homework Help”). We might not still be able to ‘Link Services and People’ with this old data, but can’t the data itself have historical relevance? Has anybody kept a copy of it, in any form? My mother worked for the Polk company, and so I’ve got a warm place in my heart for the Polk directories. These can still be accessed some 50 years and more later; they are recorded, after all, on that lame medium, “paper.”
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