Long-term Preservation of Deprecated Media: How Can Libraries Provide Information From Today’s CD-ROMs in the Future?

New data storage media advances in the 1990s brought changes to publishing practices. Storage media had gone through a series of progressions, and with falling costs of digital media, publishers now had new and affordable options for supplementing or publishing new works. Some print books included supplementary information on computer disks, and in other cases publishers made complete works available on computer disk instead of in print format. These changes in publishing are apparent in the University of Michigan (UM) Library’s engineering collection, which now includes a large collection of resources acquired in CD-ROM format. Today, the library faces concerns about the long-term viability and access to these resources. Computer storage media have already evolved from 5.25” floppy disks to 3.5” floppy disks to CD-ROMs to DVD-ROMs to USB drives. Since computer manufacturers are phasing out optical drives, users now have few options for using library materials that are formatted on disks of any kind. This “technological obsolescence” has prompted the engineering librarians at U-M to investigate how to continue providing access to materials that are published on computer disk in a future age where computer users will not have the required hardware or software available for reading the disks. Working with the library’s Digital Preservation Librarian, the engineering librarians will determine which of the engineering resources that are published in disk format must be preserved, and they will plan for best practices for preservation of, and access to, the selected resources. Only complete works published on CD-ROM are reviewed in this project. This paper will report on methods used to evaluate and decisions about long-term retention and preservation of these resources, as well as strategies for avoiding this problem in the future.