The Working Archivist's Guide to Enthusiast CD-ROM Archiving Tools
I’ve seen a lot of professional archivists who use flux disc image archiving techniques for their collections—a technique in which a specialized floppy controller captures the raw signal coming from the floppy drive so that it can be preserved and decoded in software. I haven’t, however, seen many archivists using enthusiast-developed low-level reading techniques for CD-ROM. I’ve personally been making use of these techniques and I find them very helpful; I know that many other archivists and institutions could make great use of them. However, I know that information about enthusiast-developed tools are usually deeply embedded in those communities and can be hard to find for others. As someone with a foot in both worlds, I want to try to bridge the gap and make this information available a bit more widely. This post will summarize why archivists might be interested in these tools, what they can do, and how to make use of them.
People who are familiar with emulation may think of Redump as collections of disc images online, but they’re really a metadata database for CD-ROM preservation focused primarily on games. It collects metadata of transfers of disc images but also, crucially for us, it sets standards on how disc images should be created in order to ensure accuracy. Those standards are publicly available and are easy enough to follow by anyone—not just people looking to submit to Redump’s database.
