Though it is a dying format these days, CD's have been an important method of distribution for music and software over the last 30 years. But it is not just the popularity of this format that is dying, the discs themselves are deteriorating. According to the chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress, Fenella France, "All of the modern formats weren't really made to last a long period of time. They were really more developed for mass production."
Ms France and her colleagues are trying to determine which types of CD's are most at risk for deterioration and what factors are most likely to cause damage.
"The problem is, different manufacturers have different formulations so it's quite complex in trying to figure out what exactly is happening because they've changed the formulation along the way and it's proprietary information."
Even CD's manufactured and released in the same year, by the same company may show extremely different results in their tests. While testing two copies of Earthbeat, an album by Paul Winter, released in 1987, the researchers completely destroyed the content on one of the discs in their artificial stress tests. The other, seemingly identical disc, survived intact despite the 500 hours of 175 degrees and 70 percent humidity.
And of course, burned discs are another category altogether, with the organic dyes used in them being more susceptible to damage and disc rot. Ms France claims that the organic dyes deteriorate faster than the commercially made discs. There was one statement made about deterioration of CD's that surprised me however. They say that writing on the top of a recordable CD with a permanent marker will accelerate the deterioration. We've known about applied labels causing damage, but I haven't seen evidence of markers causing damage in real life situations.
You can read more on the story at The Atlantic.
