2. Anomalies of Submitted Digital media

In fact, librarians are frequently detecting anomalies concerning the digital media integrity. These anomalies are concerning both physical and logical aspects.

a) Main examples of Physical anomalies are:

• The interruption of the uploading process (from the floppy disk to the hard disk). This is certainly caused by the bad quality of floppy disks.
• The presence of a Virus infection.

b) Main examples of Content anomalies are:

• Absence of the Cover page of the thesis.
• Lack of few parts or chapters of the thesis (TOC, bibliography,..).

The survey we conducted in April 2003 at the CERIST Library shows that:

• Among 196 floppy disks constituting a part of the Arabic theses collection, 43 disks were concerned by theses anomalies.
• Among 108 floppy disks constituting the French Theses collection, 24 disks were concerned by these anomalies.
• Among the French Theses collection of 97 CDROMS, 31 CDROMs were contained an incomplete theses.

This means that 05% of the deposited floppy disks and 32% of submitted CDROMs cannot be directly integrated and archived into the current collection. Some reparation operations must be done before. These operations consist on two main kinds of actions:

a) Repairing faulty disks and healing infected files.

b) Digitising of missing chapters and content from the printed copies.

All these actions must be managed in a way to do not complicate the whole process, do not increase the cost of the work and do not affect the quality of the archived files.

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