title: Creating Virtual CD-ROM Collections
creators: Kam Woods Geoffrey Brown
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. CDROMs present preservation challenges at the bit level and in ensuring usability of the preserved artifact. We present techniques we have developed to archive and enable 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 CDROM contents using both migration and emulation and supports remote execution of the raw CD-ROM images. Our project incorporates off-the-shelf, primarily opensource software. The raw data and (METS) metadata are made available through AFS, a standard distributed file system, to encourage sharing among libraries.
keywords: san francisco