An optical library is a set of optical volumes and the optical disk drives that are associated with those volumes. The volumes within the optical library are said to be library-resident optical volumes. Optical volumes can also be located outside of the optical library. These volumes are referred to as shelf-resident optical volumes.

Shelf-resident optical volumes can be associated with operator-accessible optical disk drives, or both, that are used to create a pseudo optical library. For more information, see Pseudo optical library concept.

An optical library can contain optical volumes that belongs to more than one Object storage group or the Object Backup storage group, or both.

A 3995 optical library can be specified as connected to more than one system within an OAMplex. However, the library must still be physically connected to only one z/OS system in an SMS complex at a time.

Optical libraries are defined to SMS and OAM using the ISMF Library Management application. For more information, see Sample ISMF session for an IBM 3995 Optical Library Dataserver.