CDRLabs.com

A lot of people have been asking about the archival properties of optical media. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has has a document titled Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs —A Guide for Librarians and Archivists with a great deal of information and recommendations on this subject.

This NIST Special Publication 500-252 is available online: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/index.html and also contains some basic technology information.

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The above link no longer works.

this link will take you to the html version of the guide:
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/contents.html

or use this if you want to download the guide as a pdf file:
http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs/CDandDVDCareandHandlingGuide.pdf