SOMBRILLA
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THE PASEO<br />
UTSA archivist Amy<br />
Rushing says there could<br />
be unique materials<br />
stowed away in Special<br />
Collections.<br />
Rescue Mission<br />
LIBRARY ARCHIVISTS ARE SAVING POTENTIALLY VALUABLE ACADEMIC RESEARCH<br />
FROM BEING LOST TO RELIC DATA DEVICES<br />
PHOTO: PATRICK RAY DUNN<br />
BY TONY CANTÚ<br />
“We don’t really<br />
know what’s on<br />
[these digital<br />
sources], but<br />
it could be<br />
material of<br />
value to<br />
researchers.”<br />
— AMY RUSHING, HEAD OF UTSA<br />
LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS<br />
6<br />
<strong>SOMBRILLA</strong><br />
The dazzling array of available technology today for<br />
data storage makes it almost inconceivable that<br />
people once relied on formats like floppy disks or<br />
CD-ROMs or Zip disks. Even noted professors were among<br />
those who once used the near-obsolete technology, and<br />
when some of their work is acquired by the UTSA Libraries’<br />
Special Collections department for its archives, there<br />
is often the odd 3.5-inch disk and the like in the mix.<br />
But such essentially unusable material is now fueling a<br />
project to retrieve potentially important data—correspondence,<br />
early research, drafts of academic papers, email—<br />
from the anachronistic devices.<br />
The effort represents the libraries’ participation in<br />
Jump In, an initiative launched by the Society of American<br />
Archivists. Special Collections joins other archives<br />
participating in the endeavor nationally and is now taking<br />
WWW.UTSA.EDU/<strong>SOMBRILLA</strong><br />
initial steps to build an electronic-records program to<br />
create an inventory of “born digital” material found on<br />
removable media in their collections. The term born digital<br />
describes any materials that were originally created<br />
digitally—papers typed on a computer word processor<br />
in the 1980s, for example. Once done, the data would be<br />
transferred from outdated formats to a secure server.<br />
Special Collections has inventoried the material—literally<br />
boxes and boxes of stuff—from the archives of<br />
individuals and organizations as part of their collecting<br />
strategies. Special Collections is also the repository for<br />
the university, where they preserve archival material<br />
transferred to the archives or solicited from prominent<br />
faculty. Two recent UTSA sources include Norma Cantú,<br />
professor emeritus in the department of English who<br />
specializes in Latino literature along with border and<br />
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