8 mm film, 8 track tapes, 8 inch floppy disks, all once promising media storage formats are for the most part gone from our daily use and even popular memory. Replaced by modern day equivalents of WAV files, MP3s, and cloud computing, our common media storage and delivery has moved from the tangible to intangible.

What is an archivist to do?

The time has come where archives and libraries are better equipped and staffed to manage the latter rather than the former. Maintaining AV rooms filled with half-working equipment for playback is a no win situation. Institutional repositories and internet based applications are better able to store, playback and preserve digitally created information than ever before.

A recent discovery of a box full of 8 inch floppies all marked as correspondence from the office of the Vice President for Health Sciences demonstrates the conundrum in the collection of historical documents. On the one hand, the content of the disks are absolutely central to the collecting focus for the History Project, yet on the other, the media is so obsolete and likely degraded to the point of being unable to retrieve any information.

The 8 inch floppy, like its successors the 5 in., 3.5in., Jaz and Zip disks, were tied to specific hardware operating systems. Yet, it often had multiple formats, disk densities, transfer rates, and spinning heads that made them even in their prime incompatible with other 8 inch disk drives. The ability to rescue data off any 8 inch diskette today would be beyond most IT skill sets and, due to the low data capacity they actually held, not worth the expense.

1980s computing taught us in the 1990s to fear the question of "how will I be able to save, read, open, edit this after the media, format, software, hardware changes?" However, in the last ten years the migration of electronic records has become easier to understand and to accomplish with only minor cautionary steps.

Changes in storage media will always challenge our preservation techniques and cause a few gaps in recorded history. This is to be expected and for the most part accepted as progress to better record keeping. I'm sure the first few recipes for baked clay tablets didn't quite turn out as expected, yet I've never heard anyone mention cuneiform tablets as an unstable media.

So with this in mind I will look at my box of 8 inch floppies, and the information they might contain, and realize that this gap of documentation is an example of the jumps made from one media system to the next that is likely lost to history.

Today, the Academic Health Center continues to partner with Fairview Health Services on a shared clinical mission. The recent report "Evaluating the Integration of the Clinical Enterprise" to the Regents demonstrates how this nearly thirteen-year old relationship continues to develop.

There is an interesting historical division between those who knew and worked within the University Hospitals and those who have only known Fairview as the owner/operator of the University of Minnesota Medical Center. For the latter, Fairview has always owned the hospital and University of Minnesota Physicians (UMP) has always been the faculty group practice.

Yet, this view seems to imply that the transition was spontaneous and effortless on January 1, 1997. In fact, the early part of the 1990s was a major time of restructuring within the AHC and in health services in general that set the stage for this change. This reorganization included a new mission for the Board of Governors as well as a closer alignment to the University of Minnesota Clinical Associates, the then faculty practice.

For a snapshot of where the University stood in 1993 read the executive summary below. Find out why a university hospital was important then. And, whether it was absolutely necessary that the University owned the hospital.

When the Board of Regents formally reorganized the health sciences into the Academic Health Center in July of 1970 it appointed Dr. Lyle French, then head of neurosurgery, as Acting Vice President for Health Sciences. In March of 1971 the Regents removed "acting" from the title and made Dr. French a full vice president.

In 1976 Dr. French requested a review of his position by the Office of the President to evaluate its effectiveness. The final report was very complimentary of Dr. French and the success of the still relatively new position of Vice President for Health Sciences. In 1981, Dr. French stepped down from his position as Vice President and returned to teaching and research.

After eleven years, the Office of the Vice President for Health Sciences was set to become vacant and the first formal search to fill the position began. Below are draft copies of the job ads sent to the Chronicle and various professional journals. You'll note that the position does not oversee the College of Veterinary Medicine. Although the 1970 reorganization aligned the CVM closely with the AHC, the reporting structure did not officially change until 1985.

The search concluded in 1982 when the Regents approved the appointment of Dr. Neal Vanselow, Chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, as the new Vice President for Health Sciences.

Read the job ads below. Would you have applied?

From time to time, when sorting though boxes and folders of personal papers and office records, certain things will jump out at you as being out of place or not part of the original intention of the creator. Often times this addition to a collection is an unwanted biological guest like bugs or spiders (sometimes living but mostly dead), mold or mildew (usually dormant but sometimes active), and once I even saw the skeletal remains of a mouse (definitely an unintentional addition).

However, working with collections that focus on the health sciences, stumbling across a biological specimen is usually no accident at all. I've found random, unlabeled paraffin wax pathology samples as well as a wax cast of the inner ear (harvested post-mortem).

Today was a new anatomical sample in the archives. Inside this miniature cigar box were nearly two dozen envelopes containing extracted adult human teeth from the 1950s.

Most had their full roots and represented all types of molars, bicuspids, and incisors.

It was as if some contemptuous tooth fairy had stashed them away.