2016 PR Xchange Award Winner

The Beloit College “Mindset List” for the entering class of 2016 notes: “outdated icons with images of floppy discs for “save,” a telephone for “phone,” and a snail mail envelope for “mail” have oddly decorated their tablets and smart phone screens”. We are living in a time where most undergraduate students have never seen a physical floppy disk, and many types of physical storage media, like CD-ROM, are rarely used. As a result, student workers in archives and special collections may not quite realize what digital media they have in front of them.

This was the impetus behind “Know Your Digital Storage Media”, a website and poster created by the Special Collections department at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Libraries. The poster contains commonly used digital media storage types, along with some fast facts about them. Amy Rushing the head of Special Collections, and one of the creators of the poster notes, “Know Your Media was not intended to be an exhaustive guide, but to instead focus on the most common types of removable media found in repositories” ((UTSA Today, Jan 2016))

Know Your Digital Media Poster - UTSA Libraries

The full-sized poster can be downloaded from the Know Your Media website.

This project won in the category of Electronic Bibliographies/Booklists, Materials promoting Collections, Services, or Resources, $10,000,000 – $15,000,000 at the 2016 PR Xchange Awards. View the full listing of award winners (PDF).

Creators:  Amy Rushing, Julianna Barrera-Gomez, and Angelique Kelley
Designer: George Marez
Institution: UTSA Libraries