Recent conversations within the Digital Preservation community have highlighted a shared struggle around database appraisal and preservation and I thought it would be a good idea to give a short talk about ongoing projects at Monash University in this area: appraising and preserving a very large legacy relational database and a smaller legacy proprietary database.

The large database contains over 25 million records, containing both PPI and time-expired records, and permanent value records. So both the volume of data and the complexity of disentangling the keep vs destroy records have highlighted it as a useful test case for developing practical, scalable workflows.

The legacy proprietary database also contains records that are of permanent value and will need to be extracted and stored in our Archive, however, the issues we face in this instance are around access to the proprietary database and vendor conflict.

These projects offer examples of how we are managing database appraisal and preservation in real-world scenarios: working through the steps of appraisal, cleaning, preparing and documenting data pre-capture, facilitating the handover of data, engaging with non-information-profession stakeholders, and packaging these databases for long-term access – be it for migration to a new database or for regulatory purposes.

I plan to talk about the tools we are using and the issues we have come up against so far. By sharing our approach and some of the decisions we’ve made along the way, I hope this short talk will be useful to others to show where we are in our journey and hopefully I can come back and talk about the projects when they have been completed as well!

The knowledge surrounding floppy disk technology spans institutional, community and generational domains. However, much of this expertise risks being lost due to insufficient documentation and generational shifts. This paper presents the initial steps of the Future Nostalgia project, which aims to identify, preserve, and make accessible the diverse body of knowledge related to floppy disks. By bridging institutional expertise, active community contributions, and intergenerational knowledge, this initiative seeks to ensure the longevity of both the material and intellectual heritage associated with floppy disk technology.

Disk imaging has become a common practice in the field of digital preservation. This process ensures a faithful capture and storage of digital content from a diverse range of storage media, including hard drives, flash storage and floppy disks. However, the field often takes for granted the perceived uniformity of disk images and their workflows. In our recent years working on ingest of portable storage media, we have been seeing a significant variability in how floppy disk images are created, processed and interpreted. This paper will explore this topic through case studies and highlight current technical and conceptual gaps that persist in the approach of the digital preservation field to disk images. Our findings emphasize the need for a more nuanced understanding of disk imaging, opening up a discussion to ensure more robust preservation outcomes.

Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure is becoming a recognized tool for reanimating complex digital objects such as CD-ROM artworks. However, some CD-ROM artworks depend on now-obsolete websites as part of their dynamic interactions. We have been using Protoweb, a community driven project that restores early Internet services, to restore websites and revive the work’s internet connectivity. This paper details the restoration of such a Hybrid work by Stelarc and Merlin Integrated Media entitled Metabody.