Preservation (library and archive)

Preservation is a branch of Library and Information Science concerned with maintaining or restoring access to artifacts, documents and records through the study, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of decay and damage.

History of Preservation

Main article: History of Preservation

This section is primarily concerned with outlining the development of professional preservation practice throughout the 20th century and into the present. The "pre-history" of preservation is briefly summarized in the section on "Antecedents," below, and expanded upon in those entries.

Antecedents

1. Oral tradition or oral culture, the transmission of information from one generation to the next without a writing system.
2. Antiquarian practices, including scribal practice, burial practice, the libraries at Pergamum, Alexandria and other ancient archives.
3. Medieval practices, including the scriptorium and relic collection
4. Renaissance and the changing conception of artists and works of art
5. Enlightenment and the Encyclopedists
6. Romantic movement’s imperative to preserve

Significant Events

1933: William Barrow publishes paper on the acid paper problem

1966: The Flood of the River Arno in Florence, Italy

1987: Terry Saunders releases the film Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record

Famous Persons

• William Barrow
• Paul Banks
• Pamela Darling
• Carolyn Harris
• Peter Waters
• Banks/Harris Award Winners
  • Gary Frost 2006
  • Paul Conway 2005
  • Jan Merrill-Oldham 2004
  • John F. Dean 2003
  • Ellen McCrady 2002
  • Sarah Buchanan 2001

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Current Practices

Care and Handling

1. Exhibitions
2. Circulating collections
3. Special collections

Library Binding

One method of preserving a library collection is to rebind paperback items in hard cover library binding. There are commercial companies that work exclusively in library binding.

Branches of Preservation

Functional Areas of Preservation

• Collections Care refers to the general maintenance and preventive care of a collection as a whole. This can include activities such as security, environmental monitoring, preservation surveys and more specialized activities such as mass deacidification.
• Conservation refers to the treatment and repair of individual items to slow decay or restore them to a usable state. Conservation is occasionally used interchangeably with preservation, particularly outside the professional literature.
• Digital Preservation refers to the maintenance of digitally stored information. This should not be confused with digitization, which is a process of creating digital information which must, in turn, be digitally preserved. Means of digital preservation include refreshing, migration, replication and emulation.
• Disaster Preparedness refers to the practice of arranging for the necessary resources and planning the best course of action to prevent or minimize damage to a collection in the event of a disaster of any level of magnatude.
• Reformatting refers to the practice of creating copies of an object in another type of data storage device. Reformatting processes include microfilming and digitization.

Media Specific Preservation

• Paper
  • acid-free paper
• Books
• Photography
  • color photography
• Recorded Sound
• Moving Image

Preservation Education

One of the biggest challenges in the field of preservation today is educating a library's community, especially librarians and other staff, in the best ways to handle materials as well as the conditions in which particular materials will decay the least. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that preservation is a peripheral element of most library science curricula; indeed, there are few places where one can receive a specialized education in preservation.207.10.54.33 21:19, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Legal issues

Reformatting, or in any other way copying an item's contents, raises obvious copyright issues. In many cases, a library is allowed to make a limited number of copies of an item for preservation purposes.

Criticism

There is a longstanding tension between preservation of and access to library materials, particularly in the area of special collections. Handling materials promotes their progression to an unusable state, especially if they are handled carelessly. On the other hand, materials must be used in order to gain any benefit from them.

In a collection with valuable materials, this conflict is often resolved by a number of measures which can include heightened security, requiring the use of gloves for photographs, restricting the materials researchers may bring with them into a reading room, and restricting use of materials to patrons who are not able satisfy their research needs with less valuable copies of an item. These measures can seem intimidating to less experienced researchers who might feel that these preservation measures are in place solely to keep materials out of the hands of the public.

See also

• Preservation, Wikipedia's disambiguation page listing articles associated with the same title.
• Art conservation and restoration, part of the allied field of Museology, also called "Art preservation"
• Film preservation, rescuing aging film stock and preserving recorded images
• Historic preservation, the theory and practice of creatively maintaining the historic built environment
• Architectural conservation, the process through which the material, historical, and design integrity of mankind's built heritage are prolonged through carefully planned interventions.
• Archaeological site conservation