In the summer of 2021, my friend and colleague Caroline Gil & I taught a two-day workshop on disk imaging for the media archiving team at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). The workshop focused on the process of disk imaging physical media: the hardware and software involved, quality assurance procedures for disk images, and, of course, use cases for disk images in a museum collection.

We got our first set of dpx files at the Hirshhorn back in December. I was really excited about developing a workflow for processing the files, especially in light of the development of Media Area’s new RAWcooked tool. Sure it was a lot of data, but I was ready. How bad could it be? And so began a two month process full of frustration and disappointment.

Worlds collide! Media preservation AND booze! Two of my favorite things. I was really happy to get to merge my hobby of making cocktails with my love for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive, a.k.a. MARMIA. MARMIA is a super cool org that preserves the cultural, social and political history of the region we call home through moving image material. Check out their website to learn more: https://marmia.org/

The Association of Moving Image Archivists conference was a great excuse to have lots of AV archivists over to MARMIA HQ at Impact Hub, Baltimore, for a few drinks. Recipes below!

There are many applications to choose from when deciding to create a disk image. As a part of developing the disk imaging workflow at the Hirshhorn, five common disk imaging applications were tested. These applications were chosen based partly on the media conservation team’s familiarity with these tools, as well as their prevalence in the field of digital preservation. In order to assess the performance of different disk imaging software, the same 32GB USB 3 Samsung flash drive, containing 2.42GB of data in a FAT32 file system was imaged using ddrescue (v.1.24), Guymager (v.0.8.8), FTK Imager for Mac (v.3.1.1 CLI), FTK Imager for Windows (v.3.2.4.6), and Tableau Forensic Imager (v.1.2.1).