Pacific University Archives DVD and CD-ROM Collection

Collection

Identifier: MS-171

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

A collection primarily consisting of DVDs and CD-ROM disks that were gathered by the Pacific University Archives in the 1990s-2010s. The contents are mostly copies of analog material, i.e. scans and digitized audio and video files created from earlier analog format originals. There is also some original born-digital material. Files include JPEGs, TIFFs, and various audio and video formats.

The bulk of the contents relate to Pacific University, such as videos created by students and the university on its own history; transcriptions of early Board of Trustees meeting minutes; and photographs of campus. The digital files from nearly all the items were converted to standard formats and copied onto the Archives' shared internal file server in 2025 for preservation and access purposes.

Dates

Creation: 1996-2015

Conditions Governing Access

Due to the fragility of the physical media and potential difficulties in finding hardware / software that can play the files they contain, virtual access to this collection is recommended. Nearly all the contents have been saved to an internal file server and may be requested for remote access. Contact the Pacific University Archives for more information.

Biographical / Historical Note

The Pacific University Archives began creating and collecting digital content based on its historic records in the 1990s. Due to digital storage limitations of the time, many of these files were saved onto physical media such as DVDs and CD-R discs. This practice continued until the early 2010s, when most digital files were instead saved onto networked drives and/or cloud servers. In 2025, the Archives gathered the physical discs into collections in order to facilitate their longer-term digital preservation. Most of the files in this collection were saved onto a shared internal file storage system and, when necessary, were converted into standardized file formats. The original physical media have been saved so that if there is a future need to re-master the content, the first version of the digital files are available.