The Diskmags Project - Preserving Early Digital Cultural Heritage

Explore the early digital cultural heritage of disk magazines from the 1980s and 1990s in this 42-minute conference talk. Learn about the Diskmags Project, which aims to catalog and make searchable approximately 2,500 electronic multimedia journals that were originally distributed on floppy disks. Discover how this small research initiative is building an international, cross-system catalog and creating a text collection of disk magazine contents, initially focusing on German-language publications. Gain insights into the challenges of preserving this valuable source for research and disk magazine communities, including identifying compression methods, creating character mappings for Unicode compatibility, and addressing legal issues related to copyright, ancillary copyright, and privacy protection. Understand the project's rapid growth, now encompassing evidence of 2,500 magazines and over 20,000 individual issues, and explore how the long-term preservation of the catalog and text collection can be ensured.