Monday, September 11, 2006

Floppy Disks

So here's a question for those of you out there in library land. What do you do with floppy disks that get left behind by patrons? In theory, we hold them for a few months, then dispose of them. However, we have no system in place to do this. They build up until there's a stack of 30 or 40 and then we go through them. Many of our patrons are switching over to flash drives (we have a mix of machines, some are not USB capable), but there are a lot (mostly younger people) that still use floppy disks.

We're thinking of getting an official floppy disk holder with month separators to slot the found disks in. But until we do this, we just have a stack.

Anyone do something different? Does anyone reformat the disks for patron use?

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I provide tech support at a public library, and I find a handful of floppy disks left behind each week. I don't know what the circ desk used to do with them, but just recently I started recycling them as "loaners" for the patrons.

We just started charging for printing, so more patrons are now more motivated to save files electronically rather than printing them out like they used to.