Electron beam generated color centers in LiF are presented as the basis for a new optical data storage scheme. Data are ＇＇read＇＇ with a confocal microscope. The alkali halide medium is capable of gray scale and multilevel or volumetric storage demonstrating a thermally stable coloration. This initial investigation shows that data can be resolved to less than 0.25 mu resolution with at least three orders of magnitude data scaling. An assessment is made for future work.