The Complete Handbook of Media Storage Cabinets & Racks

Chapter 1: Understanding Media Storage Cabinets & Racks

Every physical media collection—whether it is a thousand vinyl LPs, a retail store's inventory of DVDs, a broadcaster's tape library, or a serious home-theater disc archive—has a single point of failure that has nothing to do with the discs themselves: the furniture you put them on. A media storage cabinet or rack is, at its core, an engineered structure designed to hold a known weight, in a known space, while providing access to the contents without damaging them. The engineering is not glamorous, but it is unforgiving. A shelf rated for 40 pounds per foot will eventually fail if you load it with 60 pounds per foot. The failure may not be sudden. It may be a slow sag, a crack in a weld, or a rack that leans a little more each year. But it will happen, and it will happen to your collection.

To understand media storage cabinets, you must separate the idea of "storage furniture" from "media storage furniture." A bookcase is not a media cabinet. A bookcase is designed for the weight and dimensions of bound paper. A media cabinet is designed for the specific physical characteristics of discs, records, tapes, and cartridges. These characteristics are not trivial. A standard CD jewel case is 5.5 inches by 4.9 inches, with a thickness of about 0.4 inches. A vinyl LP sleeve is 12.375 inches square, with a jacket thickness of roughly 0.125 inches, but a typical LP with a