[MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Do you have copies of your band? DILLON HENRY: Oh, gosh. Well, I know it's somewhere. We do have an album on Spotify that we did over the pandemic that we did just like virtually. FRED RASCOE: Uh-huh. What's the name of your band? SUBJECT: King Radon and the Noble Gases. FRED RASCOE: Wow. [LAUGHTER] CHARLIE BENNETT: That's great. [MUSIC PLAYING CONTINUES] (SINGING) I knew it must have been. CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock-and-roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio with everybody-- Wendy Hagenmaier, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme. And then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. MARLEE GIVENS: Our show today is called "Meet the Archivist and the FRED." FRED RASCOE: The Fred? I'm not prepared to meet anybody today. What does that title mean? CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, all will be revealed in good time. FRED RASCOE: Ugh. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Our guest today is the new Digital Accessioning Archivist at Georgia Tech, Dillon Henry. We'll hear about his work, how he got into archiving, and yes, a bit about the FRED. FRED RASCOE: The Fred. The Fred. OK, well, I'm just going to stay on script and not worry about it yet. Our songs today are about old media formats that break, messes that come with dealing with digital technology, and nightmares faced by digital archivists. MARLEE GIVENS: It sounds scary. I know it's October. But it's too early for Halloween yet. FRED RASCOE: Well, never fear. Dillon will talk us through all of it optimistically. So I'm enthusiastic about that. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. FRED RASCOE: Yeah. In fact, Dillon is a musician and a fan of pop-punk genre. So let's start with a favorite track of his that he mentioned that will get the enthusiasm going in all of us. By request, this is "Linoleum" by NOFX, right here on Lost in the Stacks [MUSIC PLAYING] MARLEE GIVENS: You just heard "Linoleum" by NOFX. And this is Lost in the Stacks. Our show today is called "Meet the Archivist and The Fred." Our guest is Dillon Henry, the newest faculty member of the archives team at Georgia Tech. CHARLIE BENNETT: So, Dillon, what's your actual job title here at Georgia Tech? DILLON HENRY: My title is Digital Accessioning Archivist. CHARLIE BENNETT: I feel like that's treading on Wendy's territory a little bit. DILLON HENRY: A little bit, yeah. So accessioning is basically the legal transfer of materials from one person or institution to another. So basically, when someone donates something to us, we need to get it in writing and all that. So that's just what that term means. But where the digital part comes in is that we could be getting things on floppy disks or zip disks or CDs and other removable legacy media like that. Libraries have been around for thousands of years and RIP Library of Alexandria. [LAUGHTER] And we've had a long time to get used to preserving physical paper materials and bound materials, things like that. Digital technology, not so much. You can pick up a book from the 1600s. And you can open it up and see what's in there and get an idea for it. But if someone hands you a boatload of floppy disks, it's a lot harder to know what exactly you're getting. So the whole process of appraisal of deciding, hey, what sorts of things do we want to take or what do we think does or doesn't fit the institution's mission, it's a lot harder to do that when you can't just tell what something is just by looking at it. CHARLIE BENNETT: So it sounds like you're talking about the digital equivalent of just lifting the lid off the box and discovering that someone has packed a whole desk into-- DILLON HENRY: Precisely. CHARLIE BENNETT: --a cardboard box. DILLON HENRY: That it's really easy to say, OK, this we want. This we don't want. But yeah, not the same when there's that barrier of having to find a way to just basically open the cover of the book and look inside. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. Are people giving you only digital collections on physical media? Or is this like-- we talked to Alex McGee a few shows ago. So if she gets the collection from someone's office, are you all going to divvy up the work and pull out the things that are in your area? DILLON HENRY: Yes. Yeah, there's a lot of hybrid collections where people will donate physical and digital items. And so that's where the role gets a little bit tricky because there isn't just one single curator. There's different people wearing different hats. It's like some person has their main responsibility. And they're also a curator in this area. So I'll need to have these kind of lines of communication open because it could be any of a number of different people who are going to be bringing in this digital material. Yeah, so it isn't just one person. It's a bunch of people with curatorial responsibilities. FRED RASCOE: Speaking of divided responsibilities, at the very start of this interview, Charlie said something to the effect of, hey, it sounds like your job title, Digital Accessioning Archivist, you're stepping on Wendy's toes a little bit. Wendy couldn't be at this recording. But she hired you. So she's divvying up some stuff to you, right? DILLON HENRY: Yes. Yeah, precisely. Because she is wearing many different hats. And so part of this position starting out is I'm working closely with her. And I'm reporting to her obviously. So we are meeting regularly and kind of developing the responsibilities and the goals and stuff as we go along. So we're kind of building up the position's specific role as we go. There's some kind of general directions and things. But then we'll just have to see once I start looking at the old workflows and looking at the new technology that we have now. I'll have to talk about that with the computer that we have. But once I actually get down to it, then it'll be looking at the document, internal documentation that we have, and making changes there and revising workflows and all that sort of stuff. CHARLIE BENNETT: So what is your-- I want to get back a little bit to what do you do when someone hands you a bunch of magnetic media. What's your ideal situation? And what's your nightmare situation if you tried to imagine those two accessioning kind of moments? DILLON HENRY: Ideal situation is everything is very well labeled, perhaps even with some sort of spreadsheet of listing each individual item and what sorts of things are on there. That would be ideal. And nightmare is just stuff strewn everywhere, different formats, no labeling, not even in a banker's box or something. So who knows what condition? It's been in something with like-- it's not unheard of for there to be like pests or things like that in boxes of materials so like mold or things like that. CHARLIE BENNETT: I thought the digital archivists were supposed to get away from that, the mouse droppings and mold and cigarette butts. DILLON HENRY: It's probably less likely. You think about pages, like moisture and things like that, less likely. But if something has just been sitting on a shelf collecting dust for a decade or more, who knows what's going to be in there. MARLEE GIVENS: But your ideal situation also sounds like the ideal situation for a box of paper archives. You want it to come in kind of organized and labeled and you know what might be in there. I guess it's easier to deal with a box of paper that doesn't have those things than it is a box of floppies. But-- DILLON HENRY: Yeah. Yeah, it is similar. And then it gets back to the, well, paper, I can open it and look at it. And so it just be an extra step of utility for digital materials to have stuff listed out or like file directories or things like that, especially if you get like a large, like you get like a terabyte hard drive or something like that. Who knows how many thousands of files could be on there? WENDY HAGENMAIER: We'll be back with more from Dillon after a music set. FRED RASCOE: File this set under HV8079.C65. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: You just heard "Survival Song" by the delightfully named Andrew Jackson Jihad. Before that, "Architect Sleep" by The Evens. And we started with "Don't Turn Me on Just to Turn on Me" By The Mint Chicks. What a wonderful set. Those were songs about nightmare scenarios of valuable material not being accessible, not being operable, or even surviving. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: This is Lost in the Stacks. And our guest today is Dillon Henry who recently joined the archives team at Georgia Tech as the Digital Accessioning Archivist. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, let's meet the Fred. FRED RASCOE: I'm right here, Charlie. CHARLIE BENNETT: So I see that you're still moving into your office. DILLON HENRY: Yes. CHARLIE BENNETT: I kind of imagine that you would have, as the Digital Accessioning Archivist, you'd have all the kinds of computers and interfaces, the Retrotec lab sort of waiting for you to put all these different things into. Is that where you're going to do this work, bring in of the magnetic media, and then start trying to find the thing that can read it in the Retrotec lab? DILLON HENRY: So I don't have a bunch of different-- like I don't have an Apple II or something like that. But I have a bunch of different removable drives for 5 and 1/4 inch floppies, 3 and 1/2 inch floppies, zip disks, that sort of thing. But the computer that we have, the workstation, it's called the Fred. [LAUGHTER] FRED RASCOE: That's me. DILLON HENRY: He does all the work. FRED RASCOE: I was a technology acquisition. DILLON HENRY: That's the secret. FRED RASCOE: I'm a cyborg. DILLON HENRY: The FRED, it stands for Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device because I believe it was originally used for police detective work. And it's this machine that has a bunch of different hookups to it. It has this little fan that pulls out. So if you plug-in an external drive, it'll keep it cool. And it has a bunch of software on there for a bunch of different purposes, for making copies of a disk, or for extracting the files or looking at information about the files, even finding things that may have been deleted but they're still technically on a disk somewhere, that sort of thing. So it has all these different tools for copying and packaging and preserving all sorts of different types of data files. FRED RASCOE: I want to picture it. Is it like something that you have to put in a corner? Is it something that you fit on a desk? Can you hold it in your hand? What is it? DILLON HENRY: It is currently under my desk. It is tall and very heavy. Six bays that you can swap out and put different hard drives in there, a little digital interface thing and it can be used for write blocking. So sometimes, if you put a disk into a computer, the computer will just access or alter data. For instance, there was a time when I was trying to copy a CD-RW, rewritable CD. And I put it into the drive. And the computer formatted it, which is to say that it erased all the data that was on there. So with a write blocker, you can prevent that sort of thing from happening. So that's something that's a very important feature because when you want to recover data, it's a lot harder to do that when you have erased the data. And it could even be, sometimes, the computer might just modify, be like, hey, I've accessed this disk on this day in this time or something. And then you've altered the data that's on there. So. CHARLIE BENNETT: Which direction did you come into this? How did you get into this job? DILLON HENRY: I studied music composition. I got a bachelor's degree, a master's degree. And then I went out to do a doctorate thinking that I would become a professor or something like that. But when I was doing my master's, I also got really into musicology, which is like music history. So when I went to do my doctorate in composition, I also took on a master's in musicology. When we had to take Research and Bibliography and then Advanced Research and Bibliography, part of the Advanced Research and Bibliography was we had to do assignments going into the archives and special collections. I already had a master's degree. And I'd never been to a special collections. Even at that point, I still just assumed that libraries, it was just, OK, there's a bunch of books and some CDs and stuff. And we first visited. And there was kind of this curated display for us of, all these different unique materials. And I was just completely blown away. I was like, wait, libraries have these things? Like there was a was a flyer for a Black Flag concert nearby back in the '80s. And I was like, wait, they kept this? This is something that they keep? That's so cool. I couldn't believe it. And I just asked if they were hiring anybody. And they were. So I started working part time in the archives as a student assistant. And luckily, they needed people who could read music because some of the collections that we got were from musicians. So it wound up working really well. And so I started working at the reference desk and doing some processing. And I would just feel around, go back, and just see all kinds of the cool stuff that was there. From then, I wound up taking a short position as metadata specialist. So I was doing metadata entry for photographs. And then I was on a contract position doing something kind of similar to this where I was at an institution where we had a big backlog of old legacy media that were just sitting there collecting dust. So I had to find ways to access it, move it to the server, and all that kind of stuff, just the whole digital preservation lifecycle. From there, I applied to a bunch of different jobs, including music librarian positions to kind of do both worlds as well because I was doing this digital work, digital library stuff. And this is how the chips fell. And I'm really happy to be here. CHARLIE BENNETT: Can you give a definition of legacy media? You mentioned that you had all this legacy media. Can you kind of explain that a little bit more? DILLON HENRY: Yes. That's media that is pretty much just unsupported at this point. So yeah, your different types of floppy disks, Jaz disks, the mini CDs or whatever. So stuff that's just no longer supported. And I feel like soon that's probably going to be CDs and DVDs as well. I mean, my laptop doesn't have a CD drive. I don't really see many of them now being sold with them. So yeah, just media that's kind of lived past its prime and is no longer often used. CHARLIE BENNETT: And from your description of your educational background, it sounds like you are a feral archivist. Do you have an archival degree? Do you have an archivist-- DILLON HENRY: Oh, that's right, sorry, I didn't finish the story. Also, when I finished all my coursework, I was ABD. I just needed to complete my dissertation. And I was incredibly burned out. So I took two years off from working on that, staying enrolled for one credit a semester, so I wouldn't drop out or flunk. And I completed an online library science degree. And then I just, finally, in April, defended my dissertation. So I did actually complete the doctorate. So. CHARLIE BENNETT: Holy cow. DILLON HENRY: Yeah, a lot of degrees. FRED RASCOE: Was it about the Black Flag flyer? DILLON HENRY: (LAUGHING) No. Although, my Musicology master's thesis, I did write about punk music and politics. And one of my chapters was just about zines And I used the extensive zine collection that we had at the institution where I was. We had a whole bunch of punk zines from late '80s, early '90s from US, Canada, Mexico, and even some European zines as well so. CHARLIE BENNETT: How does it feel to have the coursework off your back? DILLON HENRY: Oh, my goodness. I mean, I'm 34 now. So I was in school for how many years? It feels very surreal to not have to, on the weekend, to not be like, Oh, I have to turn this paper in. Oh, sorry, I can't I can't go out. I got to study for the exam. Like it's just-- it's a very big relief. WENDY HAGENMAIER: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. And we'll be back with more from Dillon Henry, Digital Accessioning Archivist at Georgia Tech on the left side of the hour. [MUSIC PLAYING] IAN MACKAYE: Hello good people. You are lost in the Stacks with Ian MacKaye here on WREK in Atlanta. CHARLIE BENNETT: Our show today is called "Meet the Archivist and the Fred." As Dillon mentioned, he wrote his master's thesis on punk music. And I thought we should hear more about that right now. [MUSIC PLAYING] DILLON HENRY: So I wrote my master's thesis in Musicology on punk music and politics because I got my start into music in the first place playing guitar and drums in pop-punk bands and stuff in high school. And so for me, it was a chance to kind of do a deep dive on the music that I really grew up with, even more so because I grew up listening to a lot of '90s bands and stuff. And so I wasn't as familiar with some of the early music. And so it gave me a chance to explore Dead Kennedys and stuff like that who I knew a few songs but hadn't really listened to. As with any genre, there's no one-size-fits-all, one answer to-- you can't just say, oh, punk music espouses politics like this sort of way. And more than anything, I just got a big overview of this, not just like a genre, but also just like a zeitgeist, just seeing the ways that angst and stuff manifests itself in different ways and not just in different parts of the country and not just in the US and the UK, but even all around the world. Indonesia and South America, I was finding sources. So it was just really fun, deep dive into, not just a style of music, but just kind of a general attitude and way of life. CHARLIE BENNETT: File the set under Z701.3.C65C67. [MUSIC PLAYING] MARLEE GIVENS: You just heard "TV Party" by Black Flag and before that, "On Tape" by The Pooh Sticks, songs about appreciating old media formats and being distressed when they break. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. Our show today is called "Meet the Archivist and the FRED," featuring an interview with Dillon Henry, newest faculty member of the archives team at Georgia Tech. FRED RASCOE: Do you already have a sense of where you're going to be either getting or looking for those digital collections from legacy media on campus? DILLON HENRY: We do have a bit of a backlog that's documented in a spreadsheet. I imagine that's going to be where things start out. But then again, since I'm not going to be curating myself, I'm not sure. I'm interested to see who's going to come forward and be like, oh, hey, I have this and this and this and different people with different types of stuff. And I mean, I love learning new stuff and seeing stuff that I wouldn't otherwise find. And this is a great way to do that. And it would be funny, too, to see some of the stuff that might not necessarily be in the scope of what we want to collect. I was preserving stuff on disks from a repertory theater company, posters and promotional materials. And then I get to a floppy disk that has someone's fajita recipe in a Word document. Well, maybe this might not exactly be worth preserving. FRED RASCOE: Unless it's a really good fajita. DILLON HENRY: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: Are you going to try and do some outreach and help people avoid legacy media to give to archives? Like are you going to try and make your job sort of irrelevant? Or-- DILLON HENRY: Well, I gots to get paid. [LAUGHTER] Well, so you bring up something that's interesting. And there's something that I think people don't think about. Especially as we see transition to more cloud storage and things like that is that it actually can have an environmental impact. Even digital files are still physical. They're still these ones and zeros. And they're still sitting on server farms somewhere. And that takes energy to run. From a preservation standpoint, there's different levels of preservation. Like, say you just copy a disk image. But then what about the files that are on there? Do you want to extract the files? Well, then you've doubled the amount of data if you have the original CD. And then you have all the extracted files. Now, when you're preserving stuff for a library, you're also going to create metadata-- data about the data, keep track of it all. And also, when you're preserving things, ideally, you want to have it stored in three different locations just in case something happens, some sort of fire or something like that or something becomes corrupted. So you always have backups. Well, if you copy the disk image and also extract the data from it and you have it on three different servers, then you've sextupled the amount of energy you're using and the storage that that's required. So that's something that I think just doesn't-- I never thought about it until I started doing this work. And thinking about, well, if we're being responsible digital stewards, then you think about how many terabytes of data that we have. Then you think about how all these other hundreds of thousands of institutions are doing the same thing. That's a lot. And so thinking about, well, how does that affect the climate and things like that when you just have all this energy being devoted to cloud storage? So that's kind of the downside of not-- obviously you want to copy stuff from your old disks because-- I mean, I wonder how many floppy disks are corrupt at this point. But it's kind of like there's no real win because there's always some impact to the decision. And so that's something that with Bitcoin mining and stuff like that and all the energy that it was using, like oh, this is using more than the entire country of Denmark. So there's kind of that practical concern as well when considering storing digital data. MARLEE GIVENS: What's the user experience going to be like? How are people going to come in and either come in physically or come in virtually and use these things? DILLON HENRY: That is a very good question. And that's part of something that I'll be working on and collaborating with is thinking about how to make it user friendly for people to donate things to us, whether that's through an online transfer or through physical donations. So I'll be working with some other people, responsible for taking in different stuff, physical stuff, and finding a solution that kind of works for all of us and that will be hopefully easy for the user because that helps us. If it's too difficult for them, then, maybe they won't donate some stuff. And then we'll miss out on something really cool. FRED RASCOE: I know that you-- literally, you just started working just like a couple of weeks ago. I hope that this hasn't felt like an extension of your job interview. DILLON HENRY: (LAUGHING) No. No, no, no, absolutely not. I think that this kind of work is important, especially because we're going to see a lot more digital donations. So if I can just get the word out for just some of the considerations that I think people don't typically think about, it's just letting people know stuff that they might otherwise not know. So I appreciate just the opportunity to get up on my little soapbox for a minute. So I appreciate it. It does not feel like the job interview. MARLEE GIVENS: We've been speaking with Dillon Henry, the Digital Accessioning Archivist at the Georgia Tech Library. FRED RASCOE: File this set under QA76.9.D33Z57. [MUSIC PLAYING] On the one hand, you've got the law. The other hand. WENDY HAGENMAIER: You just heard "Digital" by Joy Division and before that, "Computer" by Lungfish. Those were songs about the messes we don't necessarily expect from digital technology. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Our show today was called "Meet the Archivist." CHARLIE BENNETT: And "The FRED." FRED RASCOE: Not to be confused with this Fred right here, me. We talked to Dillon Henry, Digital Accessioning Archivist at Georgia Tech about legacy media. And so I wonder if anyone on the show team has any seriously legacy media in their possession right now. MARLEE GIVENS: Well, it's not yet in my possession. But before he passed away, my father put a bunch of family tree stuff into Family Tree Maker software which I think is probably on floppy at my mom's house. It might be on CD. Or It might just-- I'm not sure. Anyway, I'm sure the file format is also obsolete at this point. And at some point, I'll get my hands on that. What about you, Wendy? WENDY HAGENMAIER: Well, if you get your hands on it, Marlee, we'll figure out how to read it. CHARLIE BENNETT: Retrotec for life. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Oh, yeah. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is an iPod from like 2004 maybe, back when there was the wheel that you clicked or spun. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. WENDY HAGENMAIER: I don't know how it works. So there's probably some mp3s on there. And like, do I still have them? Do I still want them? I don't know. But at this point, it's a really awesome artifact. Fred, it's your question. But what's your answer here? FRED RASCOE: So my first thought was to think about some old cassette tapes that I have because I have no means to play them. But I still have them. But I also thought about digital technology that I have mini disk. I don't know if you guys remember what mini disk is. The little-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, I remember. FRED RASCOE: --miniature CDs about two inches square. I had a mini disk player. And I had about 50 of those. And some of them had recordings of various music projects that I played on. And true story, this past weekend, I was digging in the closet. And I found all these old mini disks. And I spent probably an hour, an hour and a half just listening to old, old stuff. Truly happened just this past weekend. CHARLIE BENNETT: Love it. FRED RASCOE: Charlie, can you finish this segment out? CHARLIE BENNETT: I sure can. In 1999, I did a large-scale art project that involved tons of photos. And I scanned them all for long-term archival purposes and put them all on zip disk like an idiot. So I have these zip disks. And if I ever use them, it'll just be me seeing if they click or not. And they probably will. So before the click of death ends it all, let's roll the credits. [MUSIC PLAYING] MARLEE GIVENS: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library. And it's written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Today's show was edited and assembled by Charlie using a mixture of legacy media and cutting-edge digital technology. CHARLIE BENNETT: It's true. MARLEE GIVENS: Legal counsel and a pristine 7-inch of "Holiday in Cambodia" by Dead Kennedys were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. FRED RASCOE: Special Thanks to Dillon for being on the show, to all the tech archivists for all that they do. WENDY HAGENMAIER: You're welcome, Fred. MARLEE GIVENS: Woo-hoo. FRED RASCOE: And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. What would we do without the digital archivists? MARLEE GIVENS: You can find us online at lostinthestacks.org. And you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week's show is a rerun. And we'll be back with a new show the week after that. FRED RASCOE: Time for our last song today. And our last song has to be from Dillon's band which has an amazing name that you heard earlier in the show-- King Radon and the Noble Gases. I want to say that again-- King Radon and the Noble Gases. What a name. If there's a better band name derived from the periodic table, I'd like to hear about it. So let's close with a song about what Dillon does in his job trying to make something designed to be temporary last forever. This is "Blood Forever" by, yes, King Radon and the Noble Gases. Have a great weekend, everybody. King Radon and the Noble Gases. [MUSIC PLAYING]