Saving Tangible Media for Tomorrow: A Reflection from Natalie Nemes

Today’s guest post is from Natalie Nemes, a 2026 Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. Natalie recently received her Master’s in Library & Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

When I tell people that I intern at the Library of Congress reformatting obsolete media such as CDs, DVDs, and floppy disks, their first question usually is “CDs are considered obsolete?”

CDs aren’t obsolete in the same way that 8-inch floppy disks are because we still have plenty of playback equipment for them lying around. If you want to look at the files on that old CD that’s been sitting in a shoebox for the last ten years, you probably still can — either by using a disk reader you already have, borrowing one from a friend, or buying one for a small amount of money. But tangible media objects like optical disks, USBs, and of course floppy disks are still subject to damage that could make their data unreadable. Optical disks can start to decay after approximately five years, floppy disks are subject to demagnetization, and flash drives can lose their electrical charge.

How often have you tried to pop a DVD for a favorite movie into a player, only to discover it was scratched beyond repair? Have you ever come across a CD for a favorite album that looked transparent, showing that it was suffering from delamination? And there might come a day (hopefully in the far-off future, because I’m rather attached to my DVD film collection) when it’s hard to come across equipment that we can use to read the files on items like these.

Enter the Library of Congress’s Tangible Media Project. Piloted by current Collections Digitization Division Chief Moryma Aydelott, the Tangible Media Project has existed since at least 2012, according to a Signal blog post from 14 years ago. Looking back at that old article, the risk of tangible media becoming inaccessible is perhaps more apparent than it was a decade and a half ago, as optical disk formats have become even less of an everyday item.

Other custodial divisions at the Library send our section (the Digital Reformatting Section) their tangible media objects to reformat so that we can save their data. Sometimes, tangible media objects arrive as standalone objects; I’ve worked with many optical disks from the Asian Division that contain everything from documentaries to language lessons to statistical reports, for example. Other times, tangible media is packaged as supplementary material to printed items — think CDs in the back of your college textbooks.

Just like back in 2012, we use Ripstations to rip the contents of these disks. We can stack multiple items in a Ripstation at once, working in batches of around 20-25 items at a time. As the Ripstation reads the disk, it works with imaging software to create a bit-for-bit copy of all of the disk’s data, most often in the form of an ISO file. Then, we extract a complete, browsable file tree from that image file. Sometimes, if a disk consists of primarily audio files  — if it’s an audiobook CD, for example — it will rip as an MDF-MDS file. In these cases, we keep the MDF-MDS file and run the CD through the Ripstation again to capture its file tree.

The image files are preservation-quality, exact copies of all the data on the disk, while the extracted files are a browsable copy of the disk contents. Both versions of the data are important for long-term preservation, since we prefer the former for capturing the entirety of the data, but we prefer the latter for accessing the files themselves.

Sometimes, the optical disks fail on the Ripstation; they’re too damaged for the Ripstation to read or we can’t extract files from the ISO file. In these cases, we move the disks to our FRED, or Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device. We use the FRED alongside digital forensics software to read disks, create image files, and extract complete file trees from those image files. Since the FRED has multiple ports for reading different types of tangible media objects, we also use it to reformat USB drives, Zip disks (with USB-connected readers), and even hard drives.

While we can reformat floppy disks using the FRED with a USB floppy drive, we instead use a specially constructed machine we call the “Frankenstation” to read our 3.5” and 5.25” floppies. The Frankenstation is a floppy drive that contains trays for both floppy sizes. The floppy drives connect to a floppy controller  — either a KryoFlux (for 3.5” floppies) or an FC5025 (for 5.25” floppies) — with a SCSI cable. Then, the floppy controller connects to a micro FRED (affectionally called Fernando) with a USB-B cable. Using software that can copy floppy disks sector by sector, we then create ISO files of the floppies’ contents. This step can sometimes be a little tricky because there are so many different logical disk formats, and we need to select the correct one in the imaging software GUI to capture all the sectors correctly. Luckily, the software interface tells us the quality of each copied sector and we can try different formats if we choose the wrong one (see Kilobytes of Cultural Heritage: Preserving Collections on Floppy Disks for more information). Finally, we use digital forensics software to extract file trees from those image files.

In some cases, tangible media arrives with ancillary paper materials that we digitize to preserve their contents alongside the digital data. For instance, CDs and floppy disks we receive from the Geography and Map Division often contain geospatial data in proprietary software packages, which sometimes have a paper user manual. It’s important to preserve information about what the software does and how to navigate it so that Library patrons looking at these files in the future have the appropriate context for them. We digitize these materials on a BC-100 scanner, which has a cradle and two cameras  — one pointing at each side of the cradle — capable of scanning bound items.

Once we’ve edited these scans so that they look as close to the physical item as possible, we package them in a “bag,” or file directory, that also contains the image files and extracted files for the corresponding tangible media objects. Bags also have scans of the actual tangible media object to record what the physical carrier for the files looked like.

When we’ve finished bagging the digital contents of all the tangible media items in a batch, they’re ready for ingest! We upload the bags to the Library’s digital asset management system — called the Content Transfer System, or CTS — which automatically scans the bags for malware to make sure we aren’t uploading anything harmful. Once it validates the bags, CTS transfers the files to magnetic tape for long-term storage. Some items are also pushed for display, though typically to Stacks, the Library’s internal-facing object database. To view items on Stacks, researchers need to use a terminal in one of the Library’s reading rooms, and access is restricted to one or two users at a time because of copyright.

And there you have it! We’ve preserved the contents of tangible media items for posterity. In a distant future when CDs are a far-off memory and players for them don’t exist anymore, we’ll still have their data in a format that’s retrievable and accessible.

Thank you, Natalie! Stay tuned for more guest posts on The Signal this summer from the 2026 Junior Fellow cohort.