Two of the more popular aspects of the library are not books. They're CDs and DVDs. These are optical media and are susceptible to scratches which make them skip or stop playing altogether. The library where I work has a machine, which I am an expert using, which will polish most scratches off of a disk. Not all, but most. Some types of damage is unfixable. At that point, the optical media either goes out damaged or is discarded, possibly for replacement order of that specific disk or not and the book is incomplete. There's been a vandal who deliberately damages Stephen King audiobooks, ruining the final disc of each one he's borrowed so nobody else can hear the end. I do not know if the librarians have done anything about this or not. I do know that I keep getting DVDs and CDs with scratches on them, and its eating up about 90 minutes a week to repair them. I am a volunteer. No paid librarian has to time to do this. They are bogged down with cataloging tasks, with operations, with selection and purchasing, and with minding the desk. Volunteers do the book prep. Volunteers do the shelving. Volunteers do the weeding and hold list. And returned books stack up on heavy wheeled carts by the desk, showing just how behind they are. When volunteers aren't there, books aren't shelved. When I'm polishing discs, books aren't shelved.
I can't ask patrons not to scratch discs because many patrons are clumsy or ignorant of what Optical Data means. And it only takes one clumsy patron to wreck a disc for the next dozen users, and the book won't be submitted to me for repairs until one of those tells the librarian.
I can't ask patrons to repair or maintain their CD player because for many of them it is a magical device they don't understand. There's a slot or shelf, the put it there, push the button, magic happens. They don't know or care about dusting the shelf or blowing dust out of their electronics to prevent the sensors getting bogged down. Its always the disc to blame, not their poorly maintained hardware. Particularly here where half my patrons are drug growers living in lean to's or tents on BLM land or National Forest growing fields of pot very much illegally. They are in a dusty environment, watching DVDs on dusty laptops. I know this because sometimes the books come back stinking of pot. Or contain fragments of marijuana inside the containers. No, I am not joking. It is ironic that they are primary patrons just like the rich people in their forest mansions. I have to maintain media for both kinds of patrons. At this point, because I am not systematically going through the entire collection of movies and music and audiobooks systematically, I have to wait for a complaint. I have found that any disc I borrow requires polishing before it will work properly, so I only borrow on days I have access to the polisher, and polish it before taking it home. This saves irritation for me, but the problem could be prevented by digital archiving and use of USB thumb drives for the data. I really think those or cellphones are the future with this. However, and this is important, there's security risks with a sneaker net like that, and protecting both parties from viruses or malware, or claims thereof that tie up county lawyers defending against this, and possible injunctions to stop using them impacts everybody. There's a lot of ways this can go wrong. The vandal wrecking the Stephen King books would happily inject a virus into the county library computer system and trash the database if he knew how. Vandals are like that. We all know examples of attention seeking sadists out there.
The alternative to carrying the data out on DRM self-erasing file formats and security keys is streaming the data to users logged into the library system under their library account. This appears to be legal in Tennessee, but I don't know if its legal in California. If music and audiobooks stream to patrons, they won't be scratching the CDs because they won't be touching them. And 90 minutes a week will be regained for other tasks. I'm not the only one doing this task. Another person puts in the same amount of time. So its more like 3 hours a week in volunteer labor for a server which once setup and new materials are uploaded as part of the book preparation process and the CDs archived physically as backups, requires no further handling or repairs. DVDs are likewise a problem, though generally patrons are more careful with them. They tend to abuse audio CDs and are more careful with DVDs even though both are optical media. I think the track-feeder loaders on most car CD players cause most of the damage. They grind in any dust that's on their rubber wheels, and then can contact the surface while spinning. They're pretty bad.
Digital server archives of optical data need to be the way forward on this issue.
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