The Library of Congress Wants to Destroy Your Old CDs

If you've tried listening to any of your old CDs lately, if you even own them anymore, you may have noticed they won't play.

CD players have long since given up on most of the burned mixes I made in college. And while most of the studio-manufactured albums I bought still play, there's really no telling how much longer they will. My once-treasured CD collection -- so carefully assembled over the course of about a decade beginning in 1994 -- isn't just aging; it's dying. And so is yours.

"All of the modern formats weren't really made to last a long period of time," said Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress. "They were really more developed for mass production." "If you want to really kill your discs, just leave them in your car over the summer."

France and her colleagues are trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. This is a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years but won't say how. And so: we know a CD's basic composition -- there's a plastic polycarbonate layer, a metal reflective layer with all the data in it, and then the coating on top -- but it's impossible to tell just from looking at a disc how it will age.

"We're trying to predict, in terms of collections, which of the types of CDs are the discs most at risk," France said.