Assessing High-volume Transfers from Optical Media at NYPL

Abstract

NYPL’s workflow for transferring optical media to long-term storage was met with a challenge: an acquisition of a collection containing thousands of recordable CDs and DVDs. Many programs take a disk-by-disk approach to imaging or transferring optical media, but to deal with a collection of this size, NYPL developed a workflow using a Nimbie AutoLoader and a customized version of KBNL’s open-source IROMLAB software to batch disks for transfer. This workflow prioritized quantity, but, at the outset, it was difficult to tell if every transfer was as accurate as it could be. We discuss the process of evaluating the success of the mass transfer workflow, and the improvements we made to identify and troubleshoot errors that could occur during the transfer. A background of the institution and other institutions’ approaches to similar projects is given, then an in-depth discussion of the process of gathering and analyzing data. We finish with a discussion of our takeaways from the project.