Digipres
Digital Preservation without even a shoestring
I attended the #IPRES2026 conference because it happened to be in Copenhagen, and managed to get a lightning talk slot to talk about our no-budget digital preservation activities in Datamuseum.dk, and a number of attendees from other no- or low-budget institutions echoed my own feeling of isolation, due to the entrance-fees in the professional digipres societies.
I cannot fix that, but I can write our own internal workflow documentation in this corner of our public wiki, to share freely.
We do almost all of our digital preservation using "e-waste", and since you will probably not be able to acquire the same exact e-waste as us, "some assembly will be required", but I will try to make that as easy as possible.
You can email me at phk@datamuseum.dk, and I'll help to the extent I can.
Software
These are some of the digipres tools we have written:
A python3 package which can decode various old and obscure 8" floppy disk formats.
A python3 package which "exacates" a set of digital artifacts and presents them as static HTML pages.
A python3 package which decodes punched cards scanned on an optical scanner.
Workflows
- Digipres/Fanfold_listings - Scanning endless fanfold computer listings with a CZUR scanner.