Why Cambridge University Library is safeguarding floppy disk knowledge

Not all heroes wear capes. Some, like Leontien Talboom, rock bangs and suspenders while playing a real-life game of Operation on old floppy disks to preserve their content.

When Talboom was a kid, she used floppy disks to save her fictional stories about Furbys, the popular robotic toy of the 90s, which she would write on her father’s old work laptop.

Today, Talboom, who is now a Cambridge University Library technical analyst, spends her time preserving knowledge about floppies while rescuing content from them as part of the library’s Future Nostalgia project.

Guardians of the floppy disk. Why is Future Nostalgia’s work so important? There is limited time to image floppy disks (i.e., duplicate the data on them) because their material can degrade and oxidize over time.

“A lot of the ones that we have in our collection are dating from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s,” Talboom said. “So, we’re talking at least 30 years by, even getting very close to 50 years for some of them.”

Talboom added that the library hopes to archive knowledge from older floppy disks that may not currently be easily accessible.

“The bigger floppy disks, [the] 5.25-inch floppies, they come from a time when it was a little bit of a Wild West, in a floppy world where everyone was kind of still doing their own thing,” Talboom said. “So, a lot of systems from that time are not very well-documented.”

Operation save the floppy! Floppy disks in the Cambridge University Library’s collection come from a variety of different places, including the library’s special collections department, which collects records from the university and associated businesses, personal archives, and the Royal Greenwich Observatory.

The imaging process varies from floppy to floppy, according to Talboom. It doesn’t take much to image a high density 3.5-inch floppy disk, for example, because most are MS-D OS formatted, she said.

“They are quite easy to get material from just because they’re very similarly formatted to what we would expect from file systems nowadays,” Talboom said.

Older floppy disks are another story. Because modern computers are no longer able to “talk” to floppy disks, the retro computing community has developed a number of floppy disk controllers and emulators that can be used to translate the data from floppy disks to current motherboards and see the content, Talboom said

“The one that we currently use is called a Greaseweasel…That’s basically what we use for anything that’s not a high-density 3.5-inch DOS-formatted floppy disk,” Talboom said.

“It gets really complicated when you have a system which is not supported by emulators or a system that is not very well-researched, and that’s where still a lot of work has to be done,” Talboom added.

Talboom said the imaging process takes only a few minutes—“which is not too bad, but considering how little…data that actually is, it is very long,” she said. As part of the project, which has been ongoing since October 2024, Talboom has also learned tidbits here and there about floppy disk maintenance, including what to do when a floppy has mold growing on it.

“What we have discovered up to now is that just giving them a wipe has already made quite a difference,” Talboom said. “But that mold can be really damaging, not necessarily to the floppy disk drive itself, but to the floppy disk, because the reader basically latches on to the mold and smears it all around the floppy disk and can badly damage it.”

Flop on. The biggest impact of the project, which is set to conclude in January of next year, has been the creation of a guide that anyone can reference when imaging floppy disks, Talboom said. The project has also helped people better understand the need for digital preservation, which Talboom said is important for more than just accessing data from old floppies.

“That’s very true for all the emerging formats that we see nowadays. Anything that’s published on the internet, anything that comes from new sorts of hard drives or data tapes or anything like that,” Talboom said. “So, it’s also very much helped in translating and explaining what we actually do as a community because for a lot of people, it can be quite abstract and a little bit weird.”