tapes, disks, and more discs
i have been entrusted to digitize a large sum of legacy media for continued free and public access, as the original mediums are beginning to show signs of unrecoverable data loss. the scope of what i have accepted (and continue to take in) is always expanding, and has resulted in re-discovering unfinished drafts of university newspapers, photos of the city i live in from before my time, decades-old radio recordings, and much, much more.
when pursuing these projects, i always try to give as much detail about what a certain piece is, what it contains if it’s a form of data storage, and noting the methods used to preserve the content on them. it is very important to me to backup the data 1:1 to what is contained on the specific medium, or to faithfully digitize it if the material is analog. in terms of diskettes and CDs, this can be especially useful to recover deleted files thought to be lost to time, or to fix corrupted files by hand with hex-editing programs.
in a time where disc rot and demagnitization of older storage technologies is only becoming more common, it’s important to me to keep the oddities i often find in collections from literally fading away.
images
a Memorex cassette tape showing severe signs of “sticky shed syndrome”, where the binder holding the magnetic particles on the tape fails, resulting in total loss of information. the tape itself was a snapshot of someone’s university life, containing practice jam sessions, radio recordings, conversations about recording, and cold war history lectures among other things.an early example of disc rot on a CD-R. while the disc photographed wasn’t important, i have seen far worse on discs with sentimental value (long-forgotten indie bands, family photo CDs, etc.)
©2026 isiah f