What hardware would make up a good starter set for digital media acquisitions?

Organizations struggle with the question of "where do I start?" when it comes to setting up a workstation for acquiring content from digital media. Assuming something like a FRED is out of a small- to medium-sized institution's price range, what hardware would make up the basic workstation. Keep in mind that most organizations will have to deal with various sized floppies, zip drives, hard drives at a minimum.

Courtney C. Mumma

media
acquisition
hardware

Comments

Nicholas Webb: This is an excellent question, but I'd quibble with the "at a minimum" in the last sentence. A cultural heritage institution accessioning collections in arbitrary formats should have a full suite of disk drives, but in an institutional archive that exercises (or whose parent organization exercises) some control over the management of electronic records, dedicating resources to rare or obsolete storage media may not be necessary.
Bill Lefurgy: There's also the outsourcing option--it might be cost-effective to share another institution's equipment or even use a vendor.

Answer by anarchivist

In my opinion, part of the "where do I start?" question is whether the organization intends to work through a backlog or focus on active collecting. I realize at this point that it's likely to be a bit of both for any institution that is truly beginning on acquiring assets off media.

At an absolute minimum, I would recommend a USB write blocker such as the WiebeTech inline writeblocker (199 USD) or the Tableau T8-R2 (\~299 USD). While it's possible that acquisitions may come in as bare hard drives or drives pulled from existing machines, these can often be easily attached to USB enclosures. Most USB write blockers will work with the majority of USB mass storage devices, which allows for the most flexibility - for example, you can attach USB flash drives, a USB flash card reader, or USB Zip drives to a write blocker.

I also strongly recommend investing in some reasonably decent optical drives to acquire CD-ROM/CD-R/DVD images. A tray-loading drive rather than a slot-loading drive is preferable given the existence of smaller size (3" and "business card") CDs.

I'd recommend having a reasonably good amount (8 TB+, depending on how much you expect to acquire) of online, local staging storage. At my place of employment, we've used a Drobo B800fs for this, and with 8 X 2 TB drives, we have approximately 12 TB of usable staging storage.

For acquisition alone, you don't really need a high-powered machine. In fact, our acquisition machines are relatively have relatively low specs (AMD Phenom IIx4 970 3.5 GHz processor, 4 GB RAM). Alternately, I'd suggest consider acquiring (in addition, if resources allow) a high-powered laptop to make field-based acquisitions go much easier.

If you expect to do a reasonable amount of processing of acquired assets, you'll definitely want a higher-powered workstation, however, but in our case it was cheaper not to buy a FRED and instead to buy a high-end Dell workstation and add 48 GB of RAM. The specs for such a machine largely depend on the type of processing you'll be doing, though.

Any drives for obsolete or uncommon formats should be treated as extras, in my opinion. While it might make sense to have a setup with floppy drives, you should consider whether these media are worth the time and effort to set up a local means to read them. This is equally true of formats like Jaz cartridges, Syquest cartridges, etc.

In terms of useful accessories, I've mentioned them in line - things like cables, adapters, card readers, etc. are all inexpensive and easily sourced from your favorite online computer retailer.