Creating Virtual CD-ROM Collections

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, more than 100,000 CD-ROM titles have been published including thousands of collections of government documents and data. CD-ROMs present preservation challenges at the bit level and in ensuring usability of the preserved artifact. We present techniques we have developed to archive and support user access to a collection of approximately 2,900 CD-ROMs published under the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) by the United States Government Printing Office (GPO). The project provides web-based access to CD-ROM contents using both migration and emulation and supports remote execution of the raw CD-ROM images. Our project incorporates off-the-shelf, primarily open-source software. The raw data and (METS) metadata are made available through AFS, a standard distributed file system, to encourage sharing among libraries.