#endangeredarchives — Public Fediverse posts

Hackaday: How Gold Plastic Syndrome Is Killing Toys And Game Consoles. “In a recent video [Sqwerks] does a deep-dive into the problem of disintegrating plastic enclosures of Nintendo DS consoles. These original NDS handheld consoles have a metallic-like coating that appears to interact with the ABS plastic, causing yellowing as well as extreme brittleness and correspondingly broken hinges. […]

Hackaday: How Gold Plastic Syndrome Is Killing Toys And Game Consoles. “In a recent video [Sqwerks] does a deep-dive into the problem of disintegrating plastic enclosures of Nintendo DS consoles. These original NDS handheld consoles have a metallic-like coating that appears to interact with the ABS plastic, causing yellowing as well as extreme brittleness and correspondingly broken hinges. […]

Hackaday: How Gold Plastic Syndrome Is Killing Toys And Game Consoles. “In a recent video [Sqwerks] does a deep-dive into the problem of disintegrating plastic enclosures of Nintendo DS consoles. These original NDS handheld consoles have a metallic-like coating that appears to interact with the ABS plastic, causing yellowing as well as extreme brittleness and correspondingly broken hinges. […]

Hackaday: How Gold Plastic Syndrome Is Killing Toys And Game Consoles. “In a recent video [Sqwerks] does a deep-dive into the problem of disintegrating plastic enclosures of Nintendo DS consoles. These original NDS handheld consoles have a metallic-like coating that appears to interact with the ABS plastic, causing yellowing as well as extreme brittleness and correspondingly broken hinges. […]

Hackaday: How Gold Plastic Syndrome Is Killing Toys And Game Consoles. “In a recent video [Sqwerks] does a deep-dive into the problem of disintegrating plastic enclosures of Nintendo DS consoles. These original NDS handheld consoles have a metallic-like coating that appears to interact with the ABS plastic, causing yellowing as well as extreme brittleness and correspondingly broken hinges. […]

Council on Library and Information Resources: CLIR Awards Nearly $1 Million in Recordings at Risk Grant Funds. “The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is pleased to announce the thirteenth cohort of projects for Recordings at Risk, CLIR’s program that funds the digitization of rare and unique audio and audiovisual materials. An independent review panel selected 24 projects […]

Ohio History Connection: Listen, Watch and Connect with LGBTQ+ History. “In 2025, the Ohio History Connection (OHC) was awarded a Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to preserve fragile magnetic media – U-Matic, VHS, audio cassettes and 3/4” audiotape – that were reaching the end of their lifespan. The grant made it possible to work with […]

Hackaday: It’s Now Imperative That You Copy That Floppy. “Copy That Floppy! only briefly touches on the most ideal situation — that is, buying a USB floppy drive and making copies of the bog standard 3.5 inch disks you might come across. It then moves right on into more advanced topics, such as interfacing with less common drive types, how to safely clean floppies, and the use of advanced […]

The Quietus: Rotting Tape and the Gentrification of African Pop: Why We Must Save the Nollywood Archive. “VHS magnetic tape is incredibly fragile and has a limited lifespan, especially when stacked haphazardly in the un-airconditioned corners of Lagos living rooms or the labyrinthine, corrugated-iron warehouses of Alaba International Market. As I write this, thousands of original films from the […]

Harvard Gazette: Time has not been kind to VHS. “After winning the battle for dominance with the Betamax cassette, the VHS ushered in an era of amateur filmmaking, home movie collections, and video store rentals. Recognizing the value of the new format, Harvard curators quickly began amassing materials on VHS. Though no single tally of Harvard’s VHS holdings exists, a 2018 count of […]

I mentioned the grant for this project years ago but not when the project launched: HBCU Radio Preservation. From the Who We Are page: “HBCU radio stations train students entering broadcasting careers and provide an outlet for communities to engage on issues while reveling in the sounds of the Black diaspora. Their rhythms and stories demand to be heard. And yet, the original programming […]

University of New Mexico: Bringing hundreds of New Mexico Spanish archives online. “Center for Southwest Research (CSWR) archivist Samuel Sisneros and Center for Regional Studies fellow María Feliza Monta-Jameson are at the helm of the New Mexico Spanish Language Archival Recovery Project. They are working to preserve archival collections of audio and video interviews of native New Mexico […]

Popular Science: The archivist preserving decaying floppy disks. “In collaboration with retro computing enthusiasts who have built specialized floppy-imaging tools, [Leontien Talboom]’s recovered data from hundreds of historically significant disks in the library’s collection—including previously inaccessible lectures by physicist Stephen Hawking.”

The Concordian: Concordia’s Visual Collections Repository shrinks services amid funding deficits. “Concordia’s Visual Collection Repository (VCR) has faced significant budget cuts from the Faculty of Fine Arts, making it difficult for the repository to sustainably provide access to its resources. The repository is the custodian of diverse archival moving image collections — housed in […]

Without Why: The Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive Project. “A massive trove of legendary lectures by philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus is currently confined to aging cassette tapes in a closet in the Berkeley Hills. With your support, we can build a professionally curated audio archive that preserves this irreplaceable material and makes it accessible to new generations of listeners. Dreyfus’s ideas […]

How-To Geek: Why digital photos from the 2000s are disappearing (and what you can do about it). “It might not feel like it,but digital photography is still relatively new. Yet once the digital shutterbug bit, everyone was taking photos all the time. The thing is, those digital photos from the early 2000s are at risk of disappearing forever—here’s why.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/11/18/how-to-geek-why-digital-photos-from-the-2000s-are-disappearing-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/

PC Gamer: A data center fire in South Korea sees 858 TB of government files and ‘eight years’ worth of work’ stored in the cloud go up in smoke. “Allegedly, backups simply couldn’t be kept, due to the G-Drive system’s massive capacity. But it gets worse. It turns out that before the fire, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety had apparently instructed government employees to store […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/10/11/pc-gamer-a-data-center-fire-in-south-korea-sees-858-tb-of-government-files-and-eight-years-worth-of-work-stored-in-the-cloud-go-up-in-smoke/

Tom’s Hardware: AWS user’s data returned ‘because one human being inside AWS decided to give a damn’. “A software engineer and developer, who previously accused Amazon Web Services (AWS) of a ‘digital execution,’ has shared the good news that his data has now been restored. What made this impossible task possible was ‘one human being inside AWS [who] decided to give a damn,’ according to […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/08/12/toms-hardware-aws-users-data-returned-because-one-human-being-inside-aws-decided-to-give-a-damn/