CPA Annual Report: 1990 - 1991 • CLIR

September 1991

“The formats we acquire are not only books or volumes; the published material comes in eleven different formats…. The most extensive format, and the one with the least percentage growth over the twenty years, is the book collection–monographs and bound journals…. Data sets and video tapes are the two formats which have grown at the greatest rate, because they didn’t even exist in our collections twenty years ago. So it is, indeed, a different kind of collection that we provide today and that is required today by students and faculty.”

Stanford University Annual Report 1989-90, page 4

INTRODUCTION
ORGANIZATION, SUPPORT, AND 1990-91 INITIATIVES
SPECIAL REPORT: THE AGONY OF CHOICE STRATEGIES FOR PRESERVATION AND SCHOLARSHIP
TECHNICAL ASSESSMENT
THE INTERNATIONAL PROJECT
EDUCATION AND TRAINING
ARCHIVES
THE BRITTLE BOOKS PROGRAM
SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND IMPROVEMENT OF MATERIALS
INSTITUTIONAL INITIATIVES
COMMUNICATION
APPENDIX
Publications and Reports, July 1, 1990 – June 30, 1991
Committees and Task Forces
Board of Directors and Staff
FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The momentum of the Commission’s activities during 1990-91 would not have been possible without the continued assistance of a very special corps of colleges and universities. Sustained funding from the 36 sponsors listed below enabled us to move steadily ahead in exploring collaborative approaches to preservation and access challenges. The institutional sponsors were joined by foundations that also support the Commission’s projects. On behalf of the growing number of varied institutions that benefit from preservation and access initiatives, we express heartfelt thanks to:

FOUNDATIONS

The Council on Library Resources
The Getty Grant Program
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

INTRODUCTION

The substantial achievements and increased momentum of the preservation effort during the past two years have produced a heightened awareness throughout the community of both “keepers” and users” that our very successes have altered the landscape and changed our perceptions of the nature and scope of the challenge.

The last two annual reports highlighted our activities in the international and technology arenas as the Commission worked with the keepers”–the library and archival communities–to explore, establish, and refine a cooperative infrastructure for preservation operations. The results of those activities led to our raison d’etre–the present and future users” of the knowledge we preserve. Henry Riecken points out in the highlighted section of this report that, as we confront the need to design realistic approaches to action, we perforce face the devastating acceptance of the agonies of choice” and the imperative need for creative strategies in tune with an increasingly digital world. And in this new world, the printed document will share its historic dominance with a multitude of media for the recording of our intellectual and cultural creativity.

We began with what, in hindsight, now appears to be a justifiably simple perspective of remedies for acid paper and the brittle book developed in a pre-technological environment. As the preservation community completes the second year of the federally funded, multifaceted initiative led by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Preservation, we can all take justifiable pride in the achievements to date. Over 342,000 volumes are in the process of being microfilmed, and substantial grants have been awarded for workshops and institutes for the training of preservation specialists, state planning activities, and the care and conservation of special collections.

The emergence of new technologies offers us new possibilities as well as new challenges for providing access to recorded knowledge as far into the future as possible. In addition, the scholarly use of those technologies continues to transform and influence the very nature of instruction, learning, and research, accompanied by vastly changed information requirements and demands. Our choices have rapidly escalated from the selection of techniques for either prolonging the life of an individual artifact or transferring the content to relatively stable but unpopular microfilm to a complex matrix of technical and intellectual decisions predicated on the proposed use of the material.

In the beginning when the book prevailed and there was no money to implement broad strategies–and no hint of the enormous impact of information technology on the generation, storage, dissemination and use of scholarly information–it made good sense to concentrate on the development of item-specific remedies for the archival longevity of the printed document. The enormous and valuable body of conservation techniques and principles developed during this period was based on the assumption that given proper care and handling, the book and manuscript were designed for perpetuity. As the publishing community embraced mass production techniques to satisfy a rapidly growing mass market, the average book became a far more fragile artifact suffering not only from self-destructing paper but from ephemeral binding, inks and glues as well.

Mass production of acid paper and steadily increasing user populations accompanied the explosion in higher education during the 20th century. Ironically, as use increased, the stability of paper and bindings decreased. As with other products of high-technology mass production techniques, the life cycle of the book shortened tremendously to the point where today, in many instances, the cost of repair is greater than the cost of a replacement. The mass-produced book is a marvelous format for the inexpensive and widespread dissemination of knowledge; in achieving that goal, we sacrificed the quality and longevity of the artifact. It is essential that we recognize this fundamental change in the structure of books in order to distinguish among strategies for the repair of heavily used items not designed to withstand such heavy use, the conservation of artifacts with aesthetic and cultural value as well as the potential for longevity, and the transfer of knowledge from books published as dissemination rather than storage vehicles.

As we moved into an unprecedented and ambitious preservation effort, the importance of these distinctions forced us to recognize the fact that our earlier remedies, based on the assumption of a manageable problem and a single medium for all deteriorating items, are no longer adequate. The infusion of federal funding and the transition of cottage industries to mass production projects transformed the preservation problem into a management challenge. Preservation managers quickly moved into the breach, honing their skills, organizing large and complicated projects, and responding creatively to a host of unanticipated dilemmas as they discovered the depth of the deterioration, the complexity of issues, and the need for new assumptions and strategies. Perhaps the most potent recognition of our initial successes is that we must move from the “shoulds” formulated in an earlier, simpler age to the “cans” of the next decade and beyond. Although we should do it all, we can’t; although we should conserve all artifacts, we can’t; and although the federal government should fund a comprehensive preservation program, it can’t.

As we face the agonies of choice, our challenge now becomes strategic. It has often been said that managers do things right, and that leaders do the right thing. We will all be tested sorely in the next few years as we seek to do the right thing for those who do now, and will in years to come, use the knowledge our strategies preserve for them.

To succeed, we must define our goal as broadly as possible–to provide access to recorded knowledge as far into the future as possible –and to seek the talents and contributions of all who believe in the importance of unobstructed access to knowledge as the bedrock of a free society. In the search for productive and admittedly partial strategies, the questions now become WHAT can we save and HOW can we do it? How can we develop meaningful rationales for funding at the federal, state, and local levels? How can we negotiate at every level with competing priorities? How can we craft a delicate balance between short-term local needs and the long-term benefits of national and international cooperation? How can we view our task from the perspective of the 21st century? There will be no single answer. In its complexity of choices and the opportunity to apply new information technologies, the preservation effort truly prefigures a vision of scholarship, the library and the university for the next century.

Patricia Battin, President

ORGANIZATION SUPPORT AND 1990-91 INITIATIVES

BACKGROUND

A mid heightened concern for the disintegrating state of the nation’s research library collections, the Council on Library Resources (CLR) was asked in 1984 by the Association of Research Libraries to develop a comprehensive nationwide strategy for a massive cooperative approach to the problem of embrittled books. After an 18-month study by librarians, university officers and scholars, the CLR-sponsored Committee on Preservation and Access published its recommendations in the report Brittle Books (Washington, DC: Council on Library Resources, 1986), which became the blueprint for action.

To carry out this mandate, CLR and the higher education community established the Commission on Preservation and Access in 1986. They envisioned the Commission serving as a matrix, providing an ordered place for existing components and seeking to supply the elements required to fill the gaps.” Today, the Commission is incorporated as an independent tax-exempt public charity, governed by a board of 13 directors. It maintains only a small staff, working primarily with and through existing agencies.

OPERATION AND STAFFING

The Commission’s elected governing board meets three times a year, with its annual meeting in the fall. Election of Commission members is based on personal qualifications and interest, and not as representatives of organizations. Board members serve three-year terms, with a three-term maximum.

Board changes during the year were:

Elected: Barbara Goldsmith, David B. Gracy II, J. L. Heilbron

Reelected: James F. Govan, Billy E. Frye

Resigned: William J. Welsh, Richard De Gennaro

Term Expired: Vartan Gregorian

Ex Officio Replacement: W. David Penniman, President of the Council on
Library Resources, for Warren J. Haas

Haas, who retired as President of the Council on Library Resources at the end of 1990, was honored for his crucial and instrumental role in conceptualizing, founding and persistently supporting the cause of the Commission.

The board charged a four-member assessment and review committee drawn from primary higher education constituencies to conduct a three to six-month analysis of the Commission’s past, present and possible future mission. The committee, functioning as independent consultants to the board, was given the following charge:

Assess the progress in preservation in the nation over the past five years;
Assess the continuing need for preservation activities and identify the major issues for the future;
Within this context, review and assess the role of the Commission, with particular attention to identifying the areas of preservation in which the Commission can be most effective; and
Recommend directions for future Commission activities.

The committee will present its final report to the board at the 1991 annual meeting.

The National Advisory Council on Preservation (NACP), comprised of representatives of 22 library, academic, governmental and scholarly organizations, meets annually in Washington, DC. At its November 1990 meeting, the group explored cooperative actions regarding copyright and mass deacidification.

In keeping with its original charge, the Commission’s administrative staff remains small, with four full-time members and three consultants. In June 1991, Dr. Margaret S. Child, former Assistant Director for Research Services of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, was engaged as a part-time program consultant to encourage collaborative strategies for the preservation of manuscript, archival and photograph collections. A student from the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science, Condict Gaye Stevenson, worked with the Commission in summer 1991 as an intern.

The Appendix contains listings of staff, consultants and members of the board and NACP.

SUPPORT

Thirty-six colleges and universities continued three-year pledges as sponsors of collaborative preservation efforts. This sustained support enabled the Commission to maintain the momentum of the expanding program of activities described in this report. Sponsors receive advanced mailings of newsletters, reports, and publications, as well. as complimentary additional copies of materials upon request.

Continuing general purpose grant support came from the Council on Library Resources and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, while special project grants were received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Getty Grant Program.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

The goal of the Commission, as outlined in the bylaws, is to foster, develop and support purposeful collaboration among libraries and allied organizations in order to ensure the preservation of the published and documentary record in all formats and to provide enhanced access to scholarly information.

Objectives addressed during the past year were:

Encouragement of continued scholar participation in devising strategies for selecting and saving materials (Special Report);

Expansion of access to preserved materials, through collaborative development of technical capabilities for the capture, transmission, and distribution of preserved information;

Advancement of support for a compatible, international database capacity for sharing preservation records across national boundaries;

Enhancement of preservation education within the library school curriculum;

Integration of archives into ongoing collaborative preservation efforts;

Continuation of broad-based support for the Brittle Books program, to preserve, on microfilm or other archival media, the contents of deteriorating printed materials;

Analysis and dissemination of scientific research and its applications for preservation and access;

Improvement in the quality of materials used to record information of long-term value;

Development of preservation guidelines and standards; and

Institutionalization of the preservation process at the local, institutional and cooperative level.

SPECIAL REPORT
THE AGONY OF CHOICE: STRATEGIES FOR PRESERVATION AND SCHOLARSHIP

For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket, and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.

James M. Barrie

Every scholar who has personally worked with endangered materials in a research library has come to realize that brittle, brown pages are to be found not simply in one or two books, but that whole shelves full are badly decayed or nearly gone. At the invitation of the Commission, James McPherson, the Princeton historian and author of Battle Cry of Freedom, testified in support of the National Endowment for the Humanities preservation program last spring. He spoke eloquently of his first experience with brittle books when, as a graduate student, he began research on the 19th century at the Library of Congress and found that:

… the shock of seeing some of these irreplaceable sources literally fall apart as I read them almost spoiled the pleasures of research. My years in graduate school came at the dawn of the microfilm age. Very few of the sources I used had been microfilmed. I read them in the original,just as they had come from the printer nearly a century earlier:

This hands-on contact with materials that had been handled by the people I was studying was thrilling, but it was also potentially disastrous. Many of these pamphlets, books and newspapers had been printed on paper made by the then-new wood pulp process. As I turned these precious but highly acidic pages. some of them tore and crumbled in my hands no matter how carefully and delicately I handled them.

I was horrified by the experience of damaging, perhaps destroying the very sources that nurtured my knowledge. Here I was in one of the world’s greatest libraries defacing its rare and valuable resources! … Intellectually I knew why these pages were crumbling, knew that it was not my fault. But emotionally, I could not escape the feelings of guilt and shame.

Professor McPherson spoke for the members of all of the Scholarly Advisory Committees the Commission has organized to help plan strategies for making the hard choices as to what and how to preserve. In their experience, the first shock–at recognizing the magnitude of the decaying book problem and its impact on scholarship–was soon followed by a second unpleasant sensation: the agony of choice.

How could they decide what to recommend for highest priority, or for deferral–which might equate to loss?

Each committee initially entertained the understandable impulse to declare ‘everything should be saved, for we cannot predict what scholars in the future will need”; but it soon became apparent that the size and comprehensiveness of research library collections, as well as the sheer cost and time required for their preservation, made the “everything” option untenable. It was at this point in each committee’s history that both the agony of choice and productive discussions of strategy began.

In many fields too the Scholarly Advisory Committees realized that forms of scholarship are not static, but are changing in ways that can be only dimly foreseen. A major influence on the ways scholars do their work appears currently to be electronic recording, storage, access and transmission of text and images. Just how current trends will work out or what scholarly practices will become established is uncertain. It is so uncertain that the prudent course may be to keep as many technological options open as possible, avoiding premature choices that might turn out not to be adaptable to new forms of research. The chosen course of action ought also to promise a long and safe storage life for the preserved material so that the process would not have to be repeated early or often.

Furthermore, the Scholarly Advisory Committees endorsed the principle of wide access to preserved materials. They favored some system of distribution or availability of documents that would in practice make it possible for a scholar anywhere to obtain needed works without having to travel to the owning library itself. They pointed out that the holdings of a research library have, in the past, been a major force in shaping and directing the scholarship of those who have had access to it, and that an optimal process for disseminating preserved materials would vastly widen the “library” available to any scholar.

Currently, five Scholarly Advisory Committees are in place: Art History, History, Medieval Studies, Modern Language and Literature and Philosophy. In addition, a joint Task Force on Text and Image, funded by the Getty Grant Program, is at work. Resembling a scholarly advisory committee in some respects, the task force is not concerned with a single field but with the special preservation problems of a particular format of communication between author and reader, namely: the illustrated text or textual commentary about non-verbal images. The task force ranges over a series of disciplines and subjects in which images in a publication are meaningfully, intellectually linked to its verbal content, not solely its aesthetic adornment.

The Modern Language and Literature Committee has made a report, Preserving the Literary Heritage, which recommends a mixed strategy for preserving the publications in this field. For instance, the committee recognized that the work of most, though not all, of the “major canonical authors” initially published during the period of acidic paper use had been or would likely be preserved by reprinting on acid-free paper. On the other hand, special effort was needed ‘ to preserve representative examples of books and papers in less commonly taught languages, by minorities and by women.” The committee also recognized implicitly that a sampling strategy might have to be applied to some very large bodies of work in a specific genre–for example, there are more than 40,000 Victorian novels.

The committee’s report also identified a problem for preservation strategy that is based on a field-by-field approach. In modern language and literature (and probably in other fields as well) there has occurred a broadening of the boundaries of scholarship, if not the intellectual basis of the field itself. In language and literature there is a growing body of scholars who identify the object of critical analysis not as the single literary work (or body of work by an author) considered in isolation, but rather its embedding in the social, political, economic and cultural conditions of the time it was created. Thus the scholar of the future who pursues such “cultural studies” may need not only the original works of literature and the scholarly commentary upon them, but also a wide range of information “in history, popular culture, newspapers, graphic material, and so on, materials that are not traditionally thought to be literature at all. Such materials would include medical journals, moral philosophy, encyclopedias, dictionaries, religious writings . . . ,” says the report. One further excerpt seems to summarize the committee’s views on preservation for “cultural studies”: “As a result, it is impossible to say of any category of books and papers ‘these are not important and can be allowed to deteriorate.”‘

Such a statement strongly supports the idea of a sampling strategy for preservation. Since there is great uncertainty about what future scholars may need, the prudent course may well be to exclude no category of books in toto, but to keep some representative samples from every “category.” This very important principle may not be without exceptions–surely no one would argue for keeping only a ‘representative sample” of Dickens’ novels–or without operational problems: defining a category is one Nonetheless, the idea suggests ways to deal with well-defined genres such as Victorian novels and Victorian moral philosophical tracts, as well as the diaries of Civil War veterans. All three of these are categories that one or another of the Scholarly Advisory Committees has pointed to as internally homoge- neous enough and content-redundant enough to justify selective preservation.

The Modern Language and Literature Committee’s report brings to the fore another uncertainty for preservation strategy: who will the future users of the preserved record be? We cannot comfortably assume that the books of research libraries should be preserved solely for the benefit of scholarly specialists–i.e., ethnographic reports for the use of future anthropologists alone, commercial treatises for economists, and so on.

Not everyone will be delighted at the thought of not having to go and root around in the stacks, but the prospect exists of heightened access, independent of the location of the original.

Preserving Harvard’s Retrospective Collections. Report of the
Harvard University Library Task Group Collection Preservation Priorities April, 1991

If a literary critic of the 21st century is pursuing the “cultural study” of Victorian novels, he or she may need access to the ethnographic accounts of British explorers to know what they believed and reported about the peoples of Africa, while the student of Henry Jarnes’s work may wish to know details of the contemporary publishing industry and its financial arrangements with authors. What is passe to the specialist may be of quintessential interest to a scholar venturing from another discipline.

The Joint Task Force on Text and Image had a parallel insight in the course of discussions at its second meeting in January 1991. While the original impetus for organizing the task force came from a group of art historians gathered at a Commission-sponsored conference in 1988 (Scholarly Resources in Art History . . ., Washington, DC: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1989), its membership is disciplinarily diversified and its interest has extended beyond art, art history, and architecture to such fields as botany, geology, geography, medicine, taxonomic biological science and still others whose literature incorporates both words and pictures or diagrams. In the course of a discussion of preserving books on botany, the scientist making the presentation asserted that taxonomic biologists attach much less importance to photographs, whether in color or black-and-white, or to paintings of plants, however aesthetically pleasing, than they do to line drawings which provide a detailed depiction of the structural features of the specimen. It is these latter features that enable identification or classification and hence meet scientific needs. This view would seem to neglect the interests of non-specialists such as the amateur naturalist or, indeed, the decorative artist.

If the purposes of publishers are to educate, inform, entertain, inspire, and communicate, then the book is only one of a number of forms these activities will take….

Introduction to Publishing Research Quarterly, Spring 1991

Another idea that has emerged from several committees is that the scholarship of the future will no longer be bound by the book. Electronic means of recording, storing, reproducing and transmitting information in manifold forms are still developing and changing rapidly. Improvements in the technology can be expected. It is hard to forecast what form or forms of machine-readable text and image will be the standard in a couple of decades, but we can be confident that there will be a wide range of choices for gaining access, displaying and manipulating information that has for centuries been presented in the fixed, linear sequential format of books and journals. These are not likely to disappear, but there will be alternative or supplementary formats.

Already large bodies of important material exist in machine-readable form (the Canterbury Tales are available on CD-ROM) and this availability is likely to encourage and accelerate certain kinds of scholarship that have traditionally been done slowly and painfully by hand, such as concordances, bibliographies, and indexes. Comparative studies of usage and style have already been carried out with machine-assisted techniques. One of the earliest examples is the study by Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace that tried to settle the disputed authorship of certain of the Federalist Papers (Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist, 1964). Their initial efforts used “hand” methods until the computer center could write a program for making a concordance. Then the machine rapidly counted the occurrence of particular words, phrases, and other stylistic features of the disputed Papers that corresponded to patterns observed in Papers of known authorship. Similar literary conundrums may attract other scholars when the work is open to processing by computer.

In addition to doing more easily what has always been possible, computers will probably make possible some kinds of scholarship that are unprecedented. Indeed, it is already clear that machines can give users a vast discretion of alteration, enhancement, and supplementation. Not only can blocks of text be moved about, different texts combined or intermeshed, the color of images intensified or shifted along the chromatic scale–yellow trees and greenish skies–but related material can be brought in: reference works, maps and illustrations, auditory and visual illustrations.

J. Hillis Miller, professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, and chair of the Scholarly Advisory Committee on Modern Language and Literature, has commented on this development in a forthcoming book (Harvard University Press-Reaktion Books, 1992):

As personal computers get more and more powerful and as more and more programs and peripherals are added to them, they are becoming a scholar’s tool of extraordinary range and power. This new computer world is a realm of multimedia digital reproduction. Pictures, music, and words are all treated the same way by the computer. All can be stored in the same file. This file can hardly any longer be called a ‘text because it is as much to be seen and heard as to be read. Papers (but they are not really papers) written in the new medium will be able to reproduce photographs, film and video clips, paintings, music, sound tracks and any other material that can be digitalized.

Such features are not merely technical ruffles and flourishes, nor even simply more versatile tools for scholarly use. Rather, they change scholarship and scholars’ products in a fundamental way, Miller argues:

It is natural to resist [the] thesis that an apparently peripheral technological change like the development of sound film could transform our perception of objective reality, including even the way we see and value works of art from the past, our perception of a Ghirlandaio…. In the same way we resist the suggestion that a technological tool like the computer could change the conditions and results of scholarship. How could a technical device modulate our representations of both past and present cultural forms, make us read Shakespeare, Thoreau or Toni Morrison differently?

Exactly how may not be clear at present, but Miller is sure it will.

Much of the new technology is just beginning to be available. How much it will be used depends partly on the cost of the equipment, the charges for use and providers’ decisions about how to purvey, as well as upon user convenience and the value attached to having it. What will be done with the capacities when they are available is equally unclear. How will the academy respond to the technological future? Past experience suggests that the technological imperative will continue to govern and that what is made available will be used, though there is bound to be some division of opinion as to what will be counted as genuine scholarship in the brave new world of machine-readable information. What is incontrovertible is that the scholar of the future can have technological capacities for searching text, manipulating it and supplementing it with other information at a rate, in a quantity, and with an ease unprecedented.

Such forecasts are commonly made for the scholarly materials that are currently being developed or will be created in the future. But why should they not apply as well to preserved material? Why not offer the same opportunity to the user of classical works? Some may protest that it would be a violation of the integrity of the original, that texts and images might be subtly or outrageously altered, that the original significance not only of the words and images but also of the format of presentation would be lost. To be sure, these are possibilities but they are not necessary consequences. If in preservation the original document is faithfully reproduced and retained, and if control of “enhancement” and other changes is left in the hands of the user, then the new technology simply expands a scholar’s opportunities for exploration and experiment while still allowing conventional reading of the original, unchanged text.

A more cogent objection may be the rapidly changing state of electronic technology. Both hardware and software for text scanning and storage (either encoded or digitized) are imperfect, and the storage of digitized images is very demanding of machine memory. Almost certainly there will be substantial improvements in coming decades, but that may be too long to wait while books continue to decay. A holding technology is needed: some way of capturing and saving the contents of books that are near the end of their useable lives. Such a technology should lend itself to conversion to electronic or other formats and should allow as many options for conversion as possible. Ideally, the intermediate, “holding” technology would preserve the contents of a book over a long period of time and permit conversion to whatever new technological formats might become available in the future–including conversion to electronic media as well as to print once again.

Currently, the joint task force is looking into some aspects of this general problem. It has proposed a project to learn more about the comparative advantages, difficulties, costs and problems associated with converting a standard set of brittle books that contain images as well as text to microform and electronic storage for preservation purposes. In general, high-contrast black-and-white microfilm is a satisfactory medium for preservation of printed text, since it has a long shelf life, and can be easily copied, employed to print paper copies and conveniently moved and stored in bulk. On the other hand, this technique may not convert some kinds of images well enough to meet users’ needs. This deficit is most evident in illustrations such as reproduced photographs where continuous tone or gray-scale differentiation is informationally important. A photoengraving may have two or three times as many different levels of ‘grayness” as high-contrast microfilm can capture. The joint task force wants to explore the feasibility of several techniques for conversion and the acceptability of their product to users.

Such exploration of techniques is justified by the importance of the decisions being made on what to preserve and how to do it. The necessity for making choices about what to preserve is clear enough. There are neither resources nor time enough to save the total contents of the nation s libraries. Some portion of these contents will literally disappear into dust. The basic challenge is whether we will make informed judgments with the broadest set of options for future users, or whether we will be immobilized by the agony of making choices and leave the decision to chance.

Henry W. Riecken, Senior Program Advisor

We do not know exactly what to do step-by-step, but we know what needs to be done; enlarge the involvement of scholars and librarians in the process, explain it to a generally sympathetic public and legislature, and learn as we go how to do the job better.

“Selection for Preservation of Research Library Materials, ACLS
[American Council of Learned Societies] Newsletter, Winter 1990

TECHNICAL ASSESSMENT

In the Special Report of the Technology Assessment Advisory Committee (TAAC) in last year’s annual report, we made two general observations. The first was that the impact of new electronic information technologies on preservation cannot be viewed in isolation because it is part of the much broader community involved with scholarly communication.

The second observation was that this broader community is engulfed in a transition at an accelerated pace from what has been for centuries a long-established, print-on-paper-based environment to one in which electronic-based technologies may well dominate or at least share significantly and be integrated with our traditional print options. We continue to hold these conclusions.

Our reports published by the Commission have followed a certain logic. Beginning with an analysis of long-established formats and practices, as well as the emerging technologies, our first effort was entitled Image Formats for Preservation and Access, authored by Michael Lesk, a member of TAAC. This report examined the roles of microfilm and digital capture. Since we reviewed it last year in advance of its publication, we will only summarize two conclusions particularly relevant to our ensuing inquiries and demonstration projects. First, it is not critical that one choose between microfilm and digital technologies at the outset, since later conversion is relatively straightforward. And second, large and time-consuming preservation tasks that confront librarians and archivists should not await gaining greater knowledge and a comfort level with the rapidly developing digital technologies.

The committee then turned to developing Preservation and Access Technology. The Relationship Between Digital and Other Media Conversion Processes: A Structured Glossary of Technical Terms, authored by M. Stuart Lynn, also a member of TAAC. In addition to serving as a glossary for those involved with preservation who approach the task from a broad range of professional backgrounds and technical expertise, the paper deals with the conceptual changes that result from moving from an environment in which paper remains the same medium for capture (creation and recording), storage, access, distribution, and use to a new technological environment with different electronic alternatives for each of these purposes.

Having recognized the attributes of established microfilm and microfiche for preservation and having explored the potential and implications of the newer digital technologies, we then moved toward the analysis in greater depth of these two formats and their potential complementary nature.

TAAC has asked University Microfilms International (UMI), a commercial firm working with the application of both microfilm and digital formats, to report on the role of these technologies in preservation and access efforts. The report, now in its third draft for review by TAAC, will explore, in addition to advantages and disadvantages of the two formats, the risks involved in selecting one technology over the other, the benefits of an approach that uses the strengths of both formats, the options available for later conversion from one format to the other, and the economic and quality considerations in initiating the process with one method of capture or the other.

Last year we reported on an ambitious committee project, which was exploring the many technical, economic and policy implications of the emerging local, regional, national and even international electronic networks. The project also was reviewing the general status of telecommunication technology and its promise for gaining rapid access to preserved materials that have been stored in a format conducive to electronic distribution. Because of the complexity and changing nature of the subject, the task has proved to be formidable. A report of the project, now in a second iteration, is under review.

Increasingly, the Commission, the Joint Task Force on Text and Image, and TAAC are turning their attention to print images and materials containing both text and image, and frequently color, where technical problems as well as significant economic considerations are involved in both microfilm and digital formats. While this area is likely to become a fertile field for a future publication, the initial focus has been on demonstration projects.

Demonstration projects are a vital means for the Commission to facilitate the broad dissemination of information to those libraries and archives considering the options in preserving fragile materials and gaining access to the surrogate. A demonstration project begun early this year is taking place at Cornell University under the joint sponsorship of that university, the Xerox Corporation and the Commission. The 18-month initial phase is testing the application of advanced technology for recording deteriorating books as digital images and producing at high speed multiple high-quality print copies on demand from the electronic storage files. This project, like others partially funded by the Commission, is exploring both the technical feasibility and the cost-effectiveness of the process. The initial phase calls for the scanning of 1,000 volumes in Cornell’s Olin Library and placing print surrogates of original volumes back on the shelves. Later phases will test the electronic distribution through networks to other libraries. The first three parts of the project have been completed (March 1991 newsletter).

In another multi-institution project inspired by the Cornell experience, Cornell, Harvard, Pennsylvania State, Princeton, Tennessee, and Yale universities, with the encouragement and support of TAAC, have been exploring the possible application of the new digital technologies to the preservation of and enhanced access to deteriorating research materials. Each institution has been charged with developing its own mission, objectives, and program, but the individual planning is being done in the context of an eventual collaborative effort that will seek an efficient system of electronic information exchange as each institution carries out its own preservation efforts as part of a national program. The participants in this collaborative effort recognize that the successful delivery of full-text information to end users via workstations and/or printed facsimiles over interinstitutional networks will require agreement on policy issues related to document structure, storage formats, hardware and software standards, and bibliographic control mechanisms. The group has met twice under the auspices of the Commission and TAAC, and has enlarged recently with the addition of Stanford University and the university of Southern California.

The library of the future … will not necessarily be an ‘electronic library’, nor will its mission be simply to preserve recorded knowledge. The library of the future will aim rather to generate, preserve and improve for its clients ready access–both intellectual and physical–to recorded knowledge.

Microfilm to Digital Imagery. A Report of the Yale University
Library to the Commission on Preservation and Access

In an early project initiative, Yale university conducted a study of the feasibility of converting preservation microfilms to digital format within a university setting. The resulting report, From Microfilm to Digital Imagery by Donald J. Waters, Head of the Systems Office of the Yale University Library, was developed under a contract with the Commission. A feature of the project will be the demonstration of converting microfilm to digital form rather than digitally scanning the original print copy as in the Cornell project. Much of the material already preserved throughout the world has been converted to microfilm. In addition, much of future preservation effort will involve microfilm because of its proven archival quality and established procedures, known economics and prevailing systems hardware. This project will provide us with further information as to the efficacy of making a conversion to a digital mode for easier access locally and interinstitutionally, and as part of a larger campus information system envisioned in the Yale report.

Turning to the preservation of non-text materials, as well as the combination of text and graphics, the Commission contracted with the Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research for partial support of a demonstration of image processing with the Library of Congress and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. The Commission’s interest was in the application of such technology for the archival storage and distribution of deteriorating scholarly materials containing both text and image. The demonstration included both compressed and noncompressed images and the display of the same image on original 35mm slide, analog video disc storage, 24-bit screen and printer, 8-bit screen and printer, 4-bit screen, and HDTV screen, for comparison and assessment of the quality and fidelity associated with each medium. Issues of cost comparability and product availability were discussed in a workshop following the demonstration.

Two multi-year contracts funded by the Getty Grant Program continued with demonstrations. At the MicrogrAphic Preservation Service, Inc. (MAPS), equipment and staffing was developed to provide the capacity for high quality color microphotography. A Herrmann Kraemer color camera was installed and stabilized, a team was trained, and a quality assurance station was established.

The second Getty-funded contract is a related study by the Image Permanence Institute (IPI) of the dark stability of color microfilm. Two types of film are being compared in the study: conventional chromogenic film (from Kodak) and silver dye bleach film (Cibachrome). The project scope expanded from only considering the dye fading aspects to include measurements of the physical properties of the plastic support and gelatin emulsions. Tensile strength, emulsion melting point, and emulsion wet scratch resistance are the properties being measured. This study is the first one ever to comprehensively address base, emulsion and dye stability properties in such a way as to allow for predictions of life span. As such, it may be a model for studies in the future.

* * *

In the next decade we will find ourselves engulfed in a rapid transition from a long-established, print-on-paper environment to one in which electronic technologies will dominate, share, or be integrated with our traditional print options. At a time when our recorded heritage is of a dimension and variety hitherto undreamed of, and when the durability of the media and the means of access to it are more transitory than ever before, TAAC continues to help develop the vision, policies, and institutional responsibility to assure continued access to our past for future generations.

Rowland C. W. Brown, Consultant

THE INTERNATIONAL PROJECT

We have only seen the tip of the iceberg, an iceberg which will profoundly shake German librarianship and will increasingly force [us] to collaborate beyond national boundaries; no one library in this world, indeed no single country is wealthy enough to solve the problems alone.

Kurt Nowak, Deputy Director of Die Deutsche Bibliothek, on
decaying library collections

Finding common ground while expanding its geographical base and scope of interest has become the leitmotif for the International Project. Because it was venturing into unknown territory, the project began with a rather narrow outline. In June 1988, the original goals were to explore the feasibility of creating an international database capacity of bibliographic records for preserved materials; determine the extent to which preservation records exist in other countries; identify the difficulties in converting records to machine-readable format and entering those records into a common database; facilitate agreement on the level of bibliographical detail needed to exchange records; and determine how to proceed to create a shared database capacity.

After a year of fact-finding exploration, the Commission convened a meeting in May 1990 in Zurich, Switzerland, with representatives from Canada, Venezuela, the (United Kingdom, France, West Germany, East Germany and Switzerland, to agree on minimum requirements for a compatible microform register database capacity. The basic conceptual philosophy envisions a two-tiered approach: a minimum exchange record and an optionally enhanced home record. Subsequent drafts were circulated to U.S. institutions, including the Library of Congress, the Association of Research Libraries, the Research Libraries Group and the Online Computer Library Center for their comments.

Tom Delsey, Director of Planning and Policy at the National Library of Canada, who coordinated the development of the document, noted at year’s end: “It is clear that we are close to reaching an agreement on the minimum data requirements,” echoing comments of participants abroad. The Commission also worked closely with the Management Committee of the European Register of Microform Masters (EROMM) to ensure that these efforts were compatible with that organization’s project to create a European register of bibliographic records for microform masters.

The vision of an international capacity for the exchange of bibliographic records of microform masters stimulated a concurrent effort to collect general descriptions of microfilming projects–those already completed, ongoing, or planned–at the collection level. The need for such an effort was illustrated by the following inquiry from a university librarian:

I recently saw an announcement that the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin is undertaking a project to film German dissertations. I wonder if they are aware that many of the large projects in this country are filming these dissertations. Yale, for instance, is filming great numbers of them in [its] European history project, and the University of Michigan will be doing the same in their German history project.

The inquiry was added to a working list, by no means complete, which will be periodically updated and disseminated (May 1991 newsletter). After announcing the working list, project staff heard frequently from microfilming projects abroad. Additional information will be obtained more systematically through a questionnaire to national libraries worldwide, from Albania to Zaire.

Libraries around the world are facing one of the great epidemics of modern times. One-third of the 152 million volumes in the research libraries of West Germany and 90 per cent of the 17 million volumes in Swiss libraries are suffering from some form of deterioration.

Readers Digest. British Edition. November 1990, author Robert
Wenick

A specific concern raised at the Zurich meeting centered on the possibility of inadvertent duplicate filming of Latin American materials due to an anticipated increase in preservation activities related to the quincentenary of the Spanish and Portuguese presence in the Americas. With funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Commission contracted with Dan C. Hazen, Selector for Latin America, Spain, and Portugal at Harvard College Library, to survey microfilming activity and availability for major Latin American collections in the United States. The study was published in June 1991 (The Production and Bibliographic Control of Latin American Preservation Microforms in the United States), and the National Library of Venezuela planned a Spanish translation. In addition, discussions were under way to complement this study with a similar survey in Latin America.

Funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported two projects with long-term benefits for the international scholarly and library communities. During the past year, the first of these projects began and negotiations for the second were nearly completed.

As a producer of microfilms, I am tormented by the idea that somewhere in one of the richest countries in the world, there are at least ten great university microfilming programs doing Hispanic projects about which we know nothing.

Lourdes Blanco. Director of Preservation. Biblioteca Nacional
Venezuela during Zurich meeting May 1990

At a meeting at the Bibliotheque Nationale (BN) in March 1991, the Commission concluded negotiations on a contract to convert to machine-readable form the BN’s entire retrospective register of microform masters. The two-year contract called for the library to convert 130,000 titles (mostly 19th-century French literature) to machine-readable, U.S.-compatible format. The joint project, with the BN contributing one-third of the total project cost of FF 2,682,000, was lauded by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, General Administrator of the Bibliotheque Nationale: “. . . I rejoice in this cooperation for the benefit of the international scholarly community to which we are very devoted.”

A second Mellon-funded contract was developed in concert with the EROMM effort. EROMM’s stated objectives were similar to those of the International Project: to encourage increased archival efforts by national centers; to further collaboration among European libraries; to promote international archiving standards; and to avoid the duplication of archiving efforts, especially in countries with limited financial resources for preservation.

The feasibility study for EROMM, funded by the Commission of the European Communities (CEC), states that

… libraries within the European Community are increasingly creating microform surrogates of books, serials, and manuscripts as a means of preserving decaying and heavily used materials. In order that potential users are able to identify and access microform surrogates, it is necessary to ensure that proper bibliographic records are made of filmed materials. In addition, if the costs of preservation activity are to be kept down, and accessibility to films increased, it is thought to be desirable to create a European Register of Microform Masters which would be made available to libraries and library users throughout the European community.

Initial participants in EROMM were the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, and Germany. The CEC agreed to fund 60 percent of the project’s first stage and the Commission on Preservation and Access responded to a request from EROMM to fund the remaining 40 percent. Contractual negotiations were in the final stages at year’s end. In return for financial support, the Commission will continue to be involved in EROMM’s planning and will receive, on behalf of the U.S. scholarly and library communities, bibliographic descriptions of all items collected during Phase 1. The Commission’s involvement also took into account that–even at the earliest planning stages–serious thought should be given to networking beyond Europe.

The recognition of common ground throughout the worldwide library and archives community was further strengthened by the flood of responses to initial publications on the Commission’s activities. Much-needed data about preservation activities and needs, as well as requests for cooperation, reached the International Project from all over the world –far beyond the countries contacted initially. Particularly unexpected was news of increasing cooperation between wealthy industrialized countries and less-developed ones–alliances that did not necessarily include the United States, but nonetheless affected the development of cooperative international preservation.

For example, the German government funded an assessment of Morocco’s library collections, with a view towards preserving Morocco’s invaluable and often unique materials. UNESCO funded an assessment of preservation needs at the library of the Rumanian Academy. The National Library of Australia, where discussion on the creation of a National Preservation Office is taking place, assumed responsibility for the preservation needs of countries in the region (e.g., Indonesia).

The Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, an entity of the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Social Science Research Council, established a blue-ribbon committee to assess the needs for automation, bibliographic control and preservation in the People’s Republic. The Committee asked the International Project to work with it in defining preservation needs and developing strategies for cooperative projects. In a fall 1991 trip to China, project staff will study institutions in several large cities as well as in the provinces.

The Commission board expressed its willingness to expand the International Project to the countries of Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. An opportunity to do so emerged from a November 1990 meeting in Bremen funded by the Council of Europe and organized by LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Europeénnes de Recherche). The meeting’s agenda addressed the need of Central and Eastern European libraries to participate fully in information networking, specifically in the emerging European Register of Microform Masters. Visits to the national libraries of Poland and Hungary are planned for fall 1991, along with a New York City meeting with representatives of Czechoslovak libraries.

The preservation and restoration of library values are impossible without pooling the efforts of all. This task is too costly.

N.N. Gubenko, Minister of Culture of the USSR speaking at the
Opening and Plenary Session of the 57th IFLA General Conference in Moscow, August 19. 1991

Project staff also discussed preservation issues and strategies with representatives of the Institute of Scientific Information in the Social Sciences (USSR Academy of Sciences) in Washington, DC, at a May 1991 symposium on information and documentation. It was agreed that specific proposals for collaboration would be addressed at meetings in Moscow during the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Congress.

The value of sharing information internationally extended far beyond bibliographic data, however. The International Project was active in collecting and disseminating information on a variety of applications of technology to preservation problems.

One project with implications for international cooperation is “Archivo General de Indias”–Spain’s effort to preserve in digitized form nine million documents related to its 400 years in power in the Americas. To explore collaborative possibilities, International Project staff contacted and met with the major participants: IBM Spain, a private foundation (Ramon Areces), the Ministry of Culture, and the archives in Seville. The undertaking –scaled down from an original goal of 90 million documents–involves scanning the documents and linking the resulting image database to a contextually indexed database. In addition, thousands of colored maps and other prints are microfilmed, then scanned and added to the image database; a sophisticated system manages images and text for accessibility and retrieval. The International Project began working with the project’s principals to find ways of disseminating the bibliographical database and its image equivalent beyond Seville and Spain.

The International Project supplied background materials on the USMARC format to a Swiss company as it concluded a test at the University Library of Tubingen to scan and format automatically a large part of its catalog. Efforts were under way to adapt scanning and formatting software to produce records in a variety of formats.

The technology of mass deacidification–its feasibility and economic viability–is of primary interest to a large number of countries. Not every country is conducting original research, hut all are interested in research findings. Attention was focused on the Bibliotheque Nationale of France and the National Libraries of Austria and Canada, where mass deacidification has taken place for years, as well as on research and tests being conducted in the United States, Germany and France.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek, formed by the merging of the former Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig and the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt,

continued the development of a nonaqueous magnesium methylcarbonate process which, by means of a microwave drying process, would cut the entire processing cycle to about three or four hours. If further tests prove successful, the plant–which is transportable–will be moved to Leipzig, the preservation center for the new Federal Republic of Germany.

The Bibliotheque de France (the planned French National Library) signed a contract with USSI (Usine Spéciale de Séparation Isotopique) and the German chemical company Hoechst for the development and application of a treatment (deacidification and paper strengthening) termed ” revolutionary.”

With each of these developments, there was universal caution about deacidification’s long-term effects on the book as a whole, not just on the paper. Engineers of pilot plants expressed impatience with the library community’s slow acceptance of mass deacidification methods, but the consensus of librarians and archivists in every country visited was better slow than sorry.”

International research on the rate of paper-based collection deterioration indicated substantial validation of U.S. findings. In countries where the extent of collection damage was thoroughly analyzed, a surprisingly uniform level of 25-30 percent was reported. A larger number of institutions have conducted informal surveys. For example, the National Library of Portugal reached its estimate of 25 percent collection damage by counting books that could no longer be transferred to the reading room.

In some countries, institutions decided they had a grace period during which to take preventive action. The National Library of Norway wrote:

When the reports started to come from American libraries [about damage to collections], many people in Norway thought that the seemingly stable condition of books and other records indicated that the alarm signals from some Norwegian librarians were somewhat exaggerated…. But degradation of paper is a chemical process, and chemistry knows no boundaries . . . we have learned that degradation of paper in our libraries will require about 30 more years before we have reached the alarming condition that is already present at the Library of Congress.

The development of international standards for permanent paper progressed measurably, due to individual nations’ actions as well as efforts of the International Standards Organization (ISO). It is expected that ISO will set its international standard in 1992, viewed as a major step toward universal agreement as to what precisely constitutes permanent paper. In anticipation of the standards, the German Library Institute (Deutsches Bibliotheks-lnstitut, Berlin) published a list of European manufacturers of permanent paper, including more than 25 companies in Germany, France, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands.

Since the International Project was expected to remain flexible and to add strategies as needs arose, it is not surprising that its activities stretched both geographically and in scope during the past year. Physical and economic boundaries disappeared between countries–not only in Western Europe, but in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe– as libraries in a growing number of nations discovered striking similarities in their plans and needs. In this climate of mutual exploration, the International Project was able to serve as a neutral communication link among nations, and to bring disparate countries together in collaborative preservation and access ventures. Not only did the project establish itself as an advocate of a shared international database capability, but it seized the opportunity created by political and economic change to encourage cooperation on a much broader scale.

Hans Rutimann, Consultant

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

From the broader viewpoint of nationwide planning and long-term strategies to confront the problems of deteriorating materials, preservation can be defined as the stewardship of collections, rather than a discrete set of activities within a library. The mission of formal library education, therefore, is to instill this attitude, this set of values, into the next generation of librarians. Just as preservation is an integral part of many of a library’s operations–rather than a special project apart–so in library schools, preservation is best addressed from an integrated, managerial perspective.

One of the first groups constituted by the Commission was the Task Force on Preservation Education. Convened in January 1990, this group of seven educators was charged with exploring in some detail the current status of preservation education, the projected requirements for the next decade, and the ways in which existing library school programs could be strengthened and expanded to meet new preservation challenges. Funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has supported this work, as well as the other Commission education initiatives here described.

A broad-based program of preservation education and training is essential to the long-term development of a multi-institutional preservation effort.

Excerpt from final recommendations of the White House Conference
on Library and Information Services. July 13, 1991

To assist the task force, the Commission contracted with The Catholic University of America’s School of Library and Information Science to operate a Preservation Education Institute (August 1990, Wye Plantation, MD). Library administrators, educators, archivists, network staff and preservation specialists were invited to the event in order to explore the possibilities of placing preservation in a more central position in library school curricula. The need for accelerated changes in formal library school education was identified by the participants, along with the following recommendations:

The Dean’s Council of ALISE (Association for Library and Information Science Education) should encourage the cause of preservation education;
A strong statement supporting the inclusion of preservation in the new standards should be sent to the Committee on Accreditation; and
An action plan for preservation education should be developed by the Commission’s Task Force on Preservation Education and widely disseminated to the professional community, educators, network staff and preservation specialists.

The task force completed the first two recommendations, and is preparing the third. A final report (in press) states:

Boiled down to its essence, the only solution we see for preservation education is to go beyond the techniques of preservation to a thorough grounding in managerial decision making that reflects the realities of today s research libraries.

The report will include a series of general recommendations for library schools’ consideration, as well as individual papers on how preservation topics could be added to the curriculum.

To develop a new model for management training for college librarians with part-time preservation responsibilities, the Commission contracted with the Southeastern Library Network, Inc., (SOLINET) to work with the College Libraries Committee in designing a pilot seminar (held in July 1991). The committee had recommended such a seminar, recognizing that the maturing field of preservation is moving beyond an earlier focus on techniques to a more conscious attention to strategies. The eight-day seminar focused on helping participants implement local preservation efforts that are coherent and appropriate to their size, needs and resources, and that take advantage of regional, state and national preservation initiatives. From 27 applications submitted by library directors, 16 were invited to send a staff member, with selection based primarily on institutional commitment to future preservation activities. One scholarship was awarded by the Commission. The Commission and SOLINET shared costs of the first-time operation, with an expectation that it will be repeated on a cost-recovery basis.

THE BRITTLE BOOKS PROGRAM

The Brittle Books program is a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to preserve three million brittle books and serials during the next 20 years. First funded by Congress in 1988, the nationwide program has steadily expanded its activities year by year. In 1990, concurrent with the Endowment’s 25th anniversary, NEH’s Office of Preservation announced that the quantity of saved books and serials was reaching into the hundreds of thousands, and the number of participating libraries and consortia had grown to a new high level (see sidebar).

Annual testimony, crucial for continued congressional support of preservation, once again was co-sponsored by the Commission, the National Humanities Alliance, and the Association of Research Libraries. The statements stressed the importance of sustained federal funding to maintain the momentum of the Brittle Books program (April 18, 1991, hearing before the House Subcommittee on the Interior and Related Agencies).

Dr. James McPherson, Edwards Professor of American History, Princeton University, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, spoke of his horror as he discovered yellowed and crumbling paper while conducting research for his doctoral dissertation, and of his satisfaction with the current availability of microfilmed copies of historical newspapers and pamphlets, which provide him and his graduate and undergraduate students with access to previously unusable scholarly materials.

Betty Bengtson, library director at the University of Washington, Seattle, urged continued full funding for cooperative microfilming projects under way and being planned at a growing number of universities and colleges that are serving as stewards of unique national resources.

Shortly before the April hearing, U.S. Representative Sidney Yates (D-Ill), accepted a resolution of thanks and commendation from the Commission for his pivotal role in establishing an expanded preservation program within NEH. The resolution cited Congressman Yates for his “vision and leadership in ensuring the preservation of this nation’s cultural and intellectual heritage and in guaranteeing broad access to this heritage for all citizens.”

To help assure long-term access to microfilmed versions of deteriorated scholarly materials, producers must be aware of and use specially developed preservation standards as they generate master copies. A pretest of a survey of micropublishers (conducted under contract to the Commission by the American Association of Law Libraries) confirmed that many past micropublishing projects did not have preservation as their primary objective and that adherence to archival standards varied widely. A final report on the pretest, published as an insert to the November-December 1990 newsletter, recommends a comprehensive survey of all micropublishers to gather information on current practices and to gain their support for the standards and practices necessary for participation in the Brittle Books program. The Research Libraries Group, Inc., Mountain View, CA, plans to administer the survey under contract to the Commission.

Large-scale preservation and access programs raise a number of implications concerning copyright. In a paper developed under contract to the Commission, Robert L. Oakley, Director of the Edward Bennett Williams Law Library and Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, DC, proposes a number of alternative means to protect intellectual rights while providing expanded access to preserved materials. According to Oakley, congressional revision of the current law is unlikely without a consensus among the library and publisher communities on the importance of the problem and the appropriateness of the proposed changes to the Copyright Act.

Federal Support for Brittle Books 1990-91

In fiscal year 1991, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Preservation ( now the Division of Preservation and Access) completed the third year of the Brittle Books program, a cooperative undertaking to save scholarly information of national importance that would otherwise be lost due to the deterioration of acid-based paper. The program provides an opportunity for universities. colleges and libraries to microfilm approximately three million embrittled books and serials during the next 20 years. The Division also funds the U.S. Newspaper program, an initiative to catalog and preserve on microfilm the country’s newspapers on a state-by-state basis, and awards grants for preservation education and training, the preservation of manuscripts and archival collections. the stabilization of material culture collections, research and demonstration projects, and statewide cooperative planning.

At the end of fiscal year 1991, 57 libraries and library consortia were participating in the Brittle Books microfilming program, with 367,000 volumes either completed or due for completion. Another 40,000 books will have been repaired in conjunction with these grants.

Congress provided the Office of Preservation with a substantial financial increase for fiscal year 1991. The Office’s budget was $22.6 million, including an increase of $3.6 million. Of the increase, $1.7 million was targeted for library and archival preservation programs–$800,000 to bring the appropriation to the amount established in NEH’s original congressional plan, and $900,000 to cover the costs of minor repair and rehousing of materials drawn from collections selected for NEH preservation microfilming projects. The remainder of the increase was targeted for the Endowment’s initiative for material culture collections,

The federal government also supports preservation under Title II-C, administered by the (U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Library Programs/Office of Educational Research and Improvement. In fiscal year 1990, twelve libraries and universities received $510,255 in Title II-C funds for projects involving preservation microfilming or conservation (9 percent of Title lI-C’s FY90 funding).

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND IMPROVEMENT OF MATERIALS

…As both a high-performance industry and a group of concerned citizens, the paper industry should lead the permanence issue and define it by matching customer needs and wants and setting new standards for quality, performance, and the environment…. The industry can provide the leadership to step out in front on the issue. Time is of the essence.

by Martin Koepenick “Permanent paper: The freedom to choose, in
PIMA (Paper Industry Management Association), January 1990

There is a high potential for applying the results of scientific research to large-scale preservation efforts, yet additional analysis and communication are needed before preservation specialists can take full advantage of this potential. A more complete understanding of what types of assistance the scientific community can provide to the preservation field, as well as a broader diffusion of knowledge about specific research findings, provided two focal points for action.

After compiling and broadly distributing a directory of scientific research information sources in early 1990, the Commission identified a set of related needs: to expand ongoing communication among preservation professionals, scientists, conservationists and laboratories; to target worthwhile scientific projects for analysis by the preservation community; and to interpret research results with likely applications for preservation. An initial focus on books, paper and adhesives was expanded to include microforms and newer electronic technologies.

The communications program commissioned special newsletter reports on paper research (including mass deacidification) that described how to use scientific information to make decisions about preservation activities. To test a broader approach with the preservation community, the Commission initiated a review panel composed of working librarians, archivists and conservators from eight institutions with varying preservation concerns. Provided with selected reports from research laboratories and scientists, panel members agreed to provide analyses and comments based on their institutions’ perspectives. Panelists also were expected to share their findings with colleagues through the Commission newsletter, other publications and presentations at meetings. The effectiveness of this approach will be evaluated at the end of a one-year test period.

Research and demonstration projects on mass deacidification proceeded under the auspices of several organizations, including the Library of Congress, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the German and French national libraries, and individual U.S. Libraries. Recognizing the complexity of the issues surrounding institutional decisions, the Commission strengthened its communication on this topic and continued to monitor existing activities. The newsletter provided technical updates on developments in the United States and abroad, and notices of new reports from other organizations, while a significant number of copies of two Commission reports on mass deacidification were distributed.

The use of improved, high-quality materials for books and archival collections of enduring value continued to expand significantly. Documenting progress within academic libraries, industry and government was the collaborative report, Preserving Knowledge: The Case for Alkaline Paper, developed and distributed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the American Library Association, and the Commission. The Commission newsletter cited advancements in awareness and use of quality materials outside the United States (particularly in European countries) and among a growing variety of constituencies (stamp collectors, for example).

On the legislative front, the highlight of several favorable actions at the federal level was the signing of a bill by President George Bush on October 12, 1990, establishing a National Policy on Permanent Papers (Public Law 101-423). By May 1991, an informal Commission tally showed that 25 state governments were considering legislation or other activities to encourage the use of permanent paper for materials of enduring value. In March, the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science requested all state governors and state librarians to inform them of their progress regarding the use of permanent paper, for a report to be presented to the President and Congress on the status of state-level implementation of the national policy.

Revised standards for production of permanent papers for library and archival use were under review by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). The revisions, which cover both coated and uncoated paper, are expected to be useful to publishers, printers, librarians and paper manufacturers, and to help encourage the use of permanent paper on a broader scale.

INSTITUTIONAL INITIATIVES

Events of the past year provide conclusive evidence that institutions are initiating and expanding their preservation activities. Diverse communities of newcomers are inaugurating projects, regional service providers are developing new tools and assistance, and universities with established programs are strengthening their bases of support. There is a growing recognition of an institution’s responsibility for preservation planning and action, and of the importance of local, regional and state preservation initiatives as a necessary complement to federal and international programs.

The institutionalization of preservation requires both knowledge and financial investment. To encourage the support of activities at the local and regional levels, the Commission published a fund-raising package for preservation, which was developed by Michael Miller, a library school intern in summer 1990. The package acknowledges that “Only with resources and efforts beyond that of standard operations can our precious heritage be saved. These efforts need help because no preservation program can be truly successful in isolation.” A second library school intern, Condict Gaye Stevenson, worked with the Commission in summer 1991 to develop a resource package on cooperative preservation initiatives (in press).

… Libraries have an obligation to preserve the collections under their purview as well as to inform the public about the preservation problem so that they can make their views known to their representatives, to local, state, and national governments, and to funding agencies …

Report To ALA Council of the ALA President s Preservation Policy
Committee–Preservation Policy. Subsequent Action of Council, June 1991

An alternative to developing a full range of in-house preservation capabilities, which require extensive effort and long-term financial backing, is the expanded use of contracted services. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania explored the feasibility of a management strategy in which a small internal staff would work in concert with regional preservation service organizations to supply the skills and resources needed to operate the university’s preservation program. Using funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Commission contracted with the university library to prepare a report on their findings (in press). The Penn libraries sought to formulate a comprehensive plan for preservation of the university’s collections using a broad strategic approach that considers not only local needs, but also regional and national programs, and that explores the full range of preservation technologies.

There is universal acknowledgment that environmental conditions for library and archival collections are a primary institutional responsibility. Maintenance of appropriate temperature and humidity, together with top-quality care and maintenance of the physical plant, can extend the longevity of materials under the care of institutions. Working in concert with the national Association of Physical Plant Administrators of Universities and Colleges (APPA), the Commission supported the design of a two-day seminar on Preservation of Library and Archival Materials (February 28-March 1, 1991, Washington, DC). Attendance–101 librarians, physical plant personnel and architects–was higher than expected and was divided almost equally between facilities administrators and librarians. In addition to presenting information about the improvement of environmental conditions for housing library and archives materials, the seminar fostered better working relationships among physical plant and library/archives personnel on individual campuses. The event not only benefited institutional preservation programs, but also marked a new nationwide alliance among physical plant administrators, librarians, archivists and architects. (See the Appendix for related APPA publication and article.)

Fostering college library involvement in national preservation initiatives is a major priority for the Commission’s College Libraries Committee. This active group of library directors authored the “Preservation News” column in College & Research Libraries News (Chicago: American Library Association), designed the preservation management seminar operated by SOLlNET’s Preservation Program (see Education and Training section), and assisted in planning the seminar operated by APPA (see above). The group also continued to encourage the development of proposals by their colleagues to seek funds for projects to identify and reformat or treat unique, endangered materials in their collections.

Institutionalization of preservation to expanding numbers and types of libraries is encouraged in A Practical Guide to Preservation in School and Public Libraries, developed by the Commission’s communications program and published by the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information Resources.

In collaboration with Harvard University and the Library of Congress, the Commission distributed the report from a landmark 1989 invitational preservation conference. National Conference on the Development of Statewide Preservation Programs included texts of speeches and lists of resources to support current statewide activities.

Preservation also is a focus of the upcoming White House Conference on Library and Information Services, July 9-13, 1991. Several Commission resources, including the video Slow Fires, were provided for viewing and distribution to delegates.

COMMUNICATION

I recently read an account of a number of people who had lost their memories and who were therefore deprived of their very personalities and incapable of coherent action. Isn’t there some comparable risk if institutions forget or neglect their histories? If they lose track of their past, aren’t they somehow incapacitated in dealing with the present and the future?

Untapped Sources, America’s Newspaper Archives and Histories, by
Jon Vanden Heuvel, prepared for the American Society of Newspaper
Editors Newspaper History Task Force by the Gannett Foundation Media Center, April 1991

As an advocate for the broad perspectives of preservation and access, the communications program seeks to equip those new to Commission initiatives with a solid groundwork of awareness and understanding, as well as to report regularly to preservation professionals on topics of current interest. Target audiences for communiques tend to be decision makers within higher education, science and industry, professional associations and governmental agencies–individuals who can influence and contribute to national and international agendas.

The most widely distributed materials were an updated brochure describing 1990-91 preservation initiatives and the Commission’s 1989- 90 Annual Report. The circulation of the monthly newsletter rose from 1,100 to 1,500, with the greatest subscription growth among regional and state agencies, networks and consortia, professional associations and business/industry.

The majority of the reports and publications (listed in the Appendix) were distributed on a complimentary basis to the Commission’s mailing list, with additional copies provided at no charge to sponsors. Remaining copies were provided at or below cost to other information providers, institutions, and individuals.

The communications program seeks to expand its audience as broadly as possible beyond its direct mailing list. New arrangements with journal editors led to the republication of Commission reports in three professional periodicals. An article on library environment and preservation, partially supported by the Commission, earned the 1991 Rex Dillow Award for Outstanding Article from the Association of Physical Plant Administrators of Universities and Colleges (APPA).

Eight associations and institutions requested the Commission s Giant Brittle Book for display at professional meetings. Most adapted the exhibit to reflect their own communications needs. The program continued to lend copies of Slow Fires, the award-winning film/video on embrittled books, to organizations for showing at meetings and exhibits.

NEWSLETTER CIRCULATION

The newsletter provides a monthly information exchange among individuals and organizations involved in preservation and access issues It is distributed on a complimentary basis. To contain costs, the circulation is controlled to reflect the primary audiences of the Commission. The newsletter is not copyrighted and may be freely reproduced.

PUBLICATION PRINCIPLES

The Commission s policy is to seek specialists to prepare reports on a variety of important topics: to provide responsible editorial over sight, fact checking and peer review; and to indicate the provenance of the publication. Commission publications do not necessarily reflect the individual views of the members and are intended to stimulate thought and discussion, rather than to serve as corporate pronouncements.

1991 – USE OF THE GIANT BRITTLE BOOK EXHIBIT

Used By                 For                         Date

Linguistic Society of   Annual Meeting              January

America                 Chicago, IL

Pittsburgh Regional     Spring Conference

Library Center          Dawson, PA

State Historical        Congress of Historical      June

Society of Iowa         Organizations,

                        1991 Conference

                        Des Moines, IA

Ohio State University   Preservation Exhibit        August-September

Libraries               Columbus, OH

Society of American     Annual Meeting              September

Archivists              Philadelphia, PA

University of Texas     Preservation Exhibit        October

                        Arlington, TX

AMIGOS Bibliographic    State Library Assn.         November

Council                 Meeting.

                        Phoenix, AZ

American Theological    American Academy of         November

Library Association     Religion/Society of

                        Biblical Literature Mtg.

                        Kansas City, MO

APPENDIX

PUBLICATIONS AND REPORTS

July 1, 1990 – June 30, 1991

PUBLISHED BY THE COMMISSION

The Commission on Preservation and Access Annual Report, 1989-90.

The Commission on Preservation and Access Brochure (revised – June 1991).

The Commission on Preservation and Access Newsletters: nos. 25-35 (July 1990 – June 1991).

Hazen, Dan C. The Production and Bibliographic Control of Latin American Preservation Microforms in the United States (June 1991). $5.00

Lesk, Michael. Image Formats for Preservation and Access: A Report of the Technology Assessment Advisory Committee to the Commission on Preservation and Access (July 1990).

Lynn, M. Stuart. Preservation and Access Technology: The Relationship Between Digital and Other Media Conversion Processes: A Structured Glossary of Technical Terms (August 1990). $5.00

Marcum, Deanna B. Preservation Education Institute Final Report, August 24, 1990, from School of Library and Information Science, The Catholic University of America (September 1990).

Meredith, Willis C., and Naomi Ronen. American Association of Law Libraries/Research Libraries Group Microform Master Survey: Report on the Survey Form Pretest to the Commission on Preservation and Access, September 11, 1990 (insert – November/ December 1990 newsletter).

Miller, J. Hillis, Preserving the Literary Heritage: The Final Report of the Scholarly Advisory Committee on Modern Language and Literature of the Commission on Preservation and Access. In press.

Miller, Michael. Ideas for Preservation Fund Raising: A Support Package for Libraries and Archives (July 1990). $10.00

Oakley, Robert L. Copyright and Preservation: A Serious Problem in Need of a Thoughtful Solution (September 1990). $15.00

Waters, Donald J. From Microfilm to Digital Imagery: A Report of the Yale University Library to the Commission on Preservation and Access (June 1991). $5.00

Commission sponsors receive all publications on a complimentary basis. For all others, reports are available free unless a price is listed.

PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE

Battin, Patricia. “Access to Scholarly Materials.” In Scholars and Research Libraries in the 21st Century. 21-25. ACLS Occasional Paper, no. 14, April 27, 1990. New York: American Council of Learned Societies. 1990.

Battin, Patricia. “Collection Preservation: The Practical Choices.” Paper Preservation: Current Issues and Recent Developments, edited by Philip Luner, 38-39. Chiefly papers presented at the TAPPI Paper Preservation Symposium, October 19-21, 1988. Washington, D.C. Atlanta: TAPPI Press, 1990.

Battin, Patricia. “The Importance of Archives.” The American Archivist (Special Preservation Issue) 53, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 188-90.

Battin, Patricia. Introduction to Campus Strategies for Libraries and Electronic Information, edited by Caroline Arms, 1-10. EDUCOM Strategies Series on Information Technology. Bedford, MA: Digital Press, 1990.

Battin Patricia, “Introduction: Preservation–The National Perspective.” In Issues for the New Decade: Today’s Challenge. Tomorrow’s opportunity, edited by Alphonse F Treza, 1-9. Eighth Annual Library Conference. sponsored by the Florida State University School of Library and Information Studies and the Center for Professional Development and Public Service. March 11, 1990, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990.

Battin, Patricia. “The Preservation of Knowledge: A Global Perspective.” Conference on the Global Responsibility of Law Librarians: Proceedings (October 18-21, 1989. The University of Texas School of Law, Austin, Texas), edited by David R. Burch and Stephen E. Young, 100-111. Littleton, CO: Fred B. Rothman & Co., 1990.

Battin, Patricia. “The Real Electronic Library.” Information Technology Quarterly 9, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 4-8.

Battin, Patricia. “The Silent Books of the Future: Initiatives to Save Yesterday’s Literature for Tomorrow.” LOGOS — The Professional Journal for the Book World 2, Issue I ( 1991): 11-17 (published by Whurr Publishers Ltd., London).

Sitts, Maxine K. A Practical Guide to Preservation in School and Public Libraries. Syracuse, NY: Information Resources Publications. Syracuse University, 1990.

Sitts, Maxine. Preservation: Whose Job Is It Anyway?” Conservation Administration News 42 (July 1990): 4-6; 31.

REPRINTS

Lesk, Michael. Image Formats for Preservation and Access: A Report of the Technology Assessment Advisory Committee to the Commission on Preservation and Access (July 1990). Reprinted in ‘Special Section: Digital Imagery, Preservation and Access,” Information Technology and Libraries 9, no. 4 (December 1990): 300-308.

Lynn, M. Stuart. Preservation and Access Technology: The Relationship between Digital and Other Media Conversion Processes: A Structured Glossary of Technical Terms (August 1990). Reprinted in “Special Section: Digital Imagery, Preservation and Access,” Information Technology and Libraries 9, no. 4 (December 1990): 309-336.

Ogden, Barclay. On the Preservation of Books and Documents in Original Form (October 1989). Reprinted in Abbey Newsletter 14, no. 4 (July 1990): 62-64.

Riecken, Henry. Selection for Preservation of Research Library Materials (August 1989). Reprinted in ACLS Newsletter 2, no. 3 (second series( (Winter 1990): 10-12

COLLABORATIVE PUBLICATIONS

Association of Research Libraries. Preserving Knowledge: The Case for Alkaline Paper (revised). Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, August 1990.

Harris. Carolyn L.. and Paul N. Banks. “The Library Environment and the Preservation of Library Materials.” Facilities Manager 6. no. 3 (Fall 1990): 21-24.

Morrow, Carolyn Clark, ed. National Conference on the Development of Statewide Preservation Programs. Cambridge: Office of the University Publisher, Harvard University, 1991; distributed by the Commission. $ 15.00

Pflieger. Fran, ed. Preservation of Library and Archival Materials. Alexandria, VA: Association of Physical Plant Administrators of Universities and Colleges, 1991.

COMMITTEES AND TASK FORCES

TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Rowland C. W. Brown (Chair)
Consultant
Commission on Preservation and Access

Adam Hodgkin
Managing Director
Cherwell Scientific Publishing Limited

Douglas E. Van Houweling
Vice Provost for Information Technology
University of Michigan

Michael Lesk
Division Manager, Computer Science Research
Bellcore

Peter Lyman (beginning 10/90)
University Librarian and Dean
University of Southern California

M. Stuart Lynn
Vice President, Information Technologies
Cornell University

Robert Spinrad
Director, Corporate Technology
Xerox Corporation

Robert L. Street
Vice President for Information Resources
Stanford University

COLLEGE LIBRARIES COMMITTEE

Willis E. Bridegam
Librarian of the College
Amherst College

Barbara J. Brown
University Librarian
Washington and Lee University

Joel Clemmer
Library Director
Macalester College

David Cohen
Director of Libraries
College of Charleston

Caroline Coughlin
Library Director
Drew University

Michael J. Haeuser
Head Librarian
Gustavus Adolphus College

Jacquelyn M. Morris
College Librarian
Occidental College

Kathleen Moretto Spencer (Chair)
Associate Vice President for Academic Resources and College Librarian
Franklin & Marshall College

SCHOLARLY ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON ART HISTORY

Nancy S. Allen
Librarian
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann *
Professor, Institute of Fine Arts
New York University

Phyllis Pray Bober *
Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities,
Department of History of Art
Bryn Mawr College

Elizabeth Boone **
Director of Pre-Columbian Studies
Dumbarton Oaks

Richard Brilliant
Professor. Department of Art History and Archaeology
Columbia University

Marvin Eisenberg **
Professor of Art History Emeritus
University of Michigan

Lorenz Eitner
Director
Stanford University Museum of Art

Alan Fern *
Director
National Portrait Gallery

Larry Silver (Chair)
Professor, Department of Art History
Northwestern University

Deirdre C. Stam
Professor. School of Library and Information Science
Catholic University of America

* term ended 12/90
** term began 12/90

SCHOLARLY ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON HISTORY

Margaret S. Child
Consultant

Larry J. Hackman
Director
New York State Archives & Records Administration

John Howe (Chair)
Professor, Department of History
University of Minnesota

Anna Nelson
Professor, Department of History
American University

Emiliana P. Noether
Professor of History Emerita
University of Connecticut

Mary Beth Norton
Mary Donlon Alger Professor, History Department
Cornell University

David H. Stam
University Librarian
Syracuse University

SCHOLARLY ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON PHILOSOPHY *

Jo Ann Boydston
Professor, Center for Dewey Studies
Southern Illinois University

Richard M. Burian
Professor, Department of Philosophy
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Edwin Curley
Professor, Department of Philosophy
University of Illinois, Chicago

Norman Kretzmann
Professor, Sage School of Philosophy
Cornell University

John McDermott
Professor, Department of Philosophy
Texas A & M University

Jerome B. Schneewind (Chair)
Professor, Department of Philosophy
Johns Hopkins University

Charles Young
Professor, Department of Philosophy
Claremont Graduate School

* (Note: Committee did not meet during fiscal year ’90-91 )

SCHOLARLY ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON MODERN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Emory Elliott
Presidential Chair of English
University of California. Riverside

John H. Fisher
Professor of English Emeritus
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Professor, Department of English
Duke University

Elaine Marks
Professor, Department of French
University of Wisconsin-Madison

J. Hillis Miller (Chair)
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
University of California, Irvine

W. J. T Mitchell
Professor, Department of English
University of Chicago

Rainer Nägele
Professor, Department of German
Johns Hopkins University

Annabel Patterson (resigned 8/90)
Professor, Department of English
Duke University

Catharine R. Stimpson
Dean of the Graduate School-New Brunswick and
Vice Provost for Graduate Education Rutgers University

SCHOLARLY ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON MEDIEVAL STUDIES

Steven Horwitz
Curator, Robbins Collection, School of Law
University of California, Berkeley

Mark D. Jordan
Associate Professor, Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

Christopher Kleinhenz
Professor, Medieval Studies Program
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Lillian M. C. Randall
Research Curator of Manuscripts
Walters Art Gallery

Susanne F. Roberts (Chair)
Humanities Bibliographer, University Library
Yale University

Fred C. Robinson
Professor, Department of English
Yale University

Jan M. Ziolkowski
Professor, Department of Comparative Literature
Harvard University

JOINT TASK FORCE ON TEXT AND IMAGE

Nancy S. Allen
Librarian
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Thomas C. Battle
Director, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center
Howard University

Robert Brentano
Professor, Department of History
University of California, Berkeley

Richard Brilliant (Chair)
Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology
Columbia University

David B. Brownlee
Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art
University of Pennsylvania

Janet Buerger
Lecturer
Harvard University Extension

Angela Giral
Librarian. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library
Columbia University

Anne R. Kenney
Assistant Director, Department of Preservation and Conservation. University Library
Cornell University

Susan Klimley
Geological Sciences Librarian
Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University

M. Stuart Lynn (Liaison from Technology Assessment Advisory Committee)
Vice President. Information Technologies
Cornell University

Katharine Martinez
Director
The Winterthur Library

James R. McCredie (resigned 1/91 )
Institute of Fine Arts
New York University

Robert G. Neiley
Robert G. Neiley Architects

R. Nicholas Olsberg
Head of Collections
Canadian Centre for Architecture

John Parascandola
Chief. History of Medicine Division
National Library of Medicine

Donald Posner (beginning 1/91 )
Professor, Institute of Fine Arts
New York University

TASK FORCE ON PRESERVATION EDUCATION

Sally Buchanan
Adjunct Professor, School of Library and Information Science
University of Pittsburgh

David B. Gracy II
Governor Bill Daniel Professor in Archival Enterprise, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Texas at Austin

Carolyn Harris
Director of Conservation Education Programs, School of Library Service
Columbia University

Beverly P. Lynch
Dean, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of California. Los Angeles

Deanna B. Marcum (Chair)
Dean, School of Library and Information Science
Catholic University of America

Sally Roggia (resigned 10/90)
Visiting Professor, School of Library and Information Studies
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Robert D. Stueart
Dean, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Simmons College

SOCIETY OF AMERICAN ARCHIVISTS TASK FORCE ON PRESERVATION

Margaret S. Child
Consultant

Paul Conway
Archives Specialist, Archival Research and Evaluation Staff
National Archives and Records Administration

Lisa L. Fox
Development Officer, Preservation Program
Southeastern Library Network, Inc.

Karen Garlick
Senior Conservator
National Archives and Records Administration

Anne R. Kenney
Assistant Director. Department of Preservation and Conservation, University Library
Cornell University

Howard P. Lowell (Co-Chair)
State Archivist
Delaware State Archives and Records Administration

Paul McCarthy
Library Director
University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Christine Ward (Co-Chair)
Chief, Bureau of Archival Services
New York State Archives and Records Administration

ASSESSMENT AND REVIEW COMMITTEE

Arthur Norberg
Director, Charles Babbage Institute
University of Minnesota

William D. Schaefer
Professor of English Emeritus
University of California, Los Angeles

David H. Stam (Chair)
University Librarian
Syracuse University

L. Yvonne Wulff
Assistant Director for Collection Management, University Library
University of Michigan

NATIONAL ADVISORY COUNCIL ON PRESERVATION

American Association for the Advancement of Science
Karen B. Levitan

American Council of Learned Societies
John Howe

American Library Association
Connie Brooks (beginning 5/91 )

American Philosophical Association
David A. Hoekema

American Theological Library Association
Albert E. Hurd

Association of American Universities
John C. Vaughn (beginning 2/91 )

Association of Research Libraries
William J. Studer

Center for Research Libraries
Donald B. Simpson

Chief Officers of State Library Agencies
Barbara Weaver

Independent Research Libraries Association
Marcus A. McCorison

Library of Congress
Kenneth E. Harris

National Agricultural Library
Leslie A. Kulp

National Archives and Records Administration
Alan Calmes

National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators
Howard P. Lowell

National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges
J. Dennis O’Connor

National Commission on Libraries and Information Science
Barbara H. Taylor

National Endowment for the Humanities
George F. Farr, Jr.

National Library of Medicine
Margaret M. Byrnes

Research Libraries Advisory Committee (OCLC)
Kate Nevins

Research Libraries Group
Patricia A. McClung

Social Science Research Council
Gloria Kirchheimer

Society of American Archivists
Howard P. Lowell (9/90-9/91 )

THE COMMISSION ON PRESERVATION AND ACCESS

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Millicent D. Abell
University Librarian
Yale University

Henriette D. Avram
Associate Librarian for Collections Services
Library of Congress

Patricia Battin
President
Commission on Preservation and Access

Richard De Gennaro (resigned 10/90)
Roy E. Larsen Librarian
Harvard College Library

Billy E. Frye (Chair)
Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost
Emory University

Barbara Goldsmith (elected 4/91 )
Trustee
New York Public Library

James F. Govan
University Librarian
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

David B. Gracy II (elected 4/91 )
Governor Bill Daniel Professor in Archival Enterprise, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Texas at Austin

Vartan Gregorian (term expired 10/90)
President
Brown University

Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis
Vice President, Indiana University
and Chancellor, Bloomington
Indiana University

Warren J. Haas (retired 12/90)
President
Council on Library Resources

J. L. Heilbron (elected 4/91 )
Vice Chancellor
University of California, Berkeley

Carole Huxley
Deputy Commissioner for Cultural Education
New York State Education Department

Donald S. Lamm
President
W.W. Norton and Company

W. David Penniman (ex officio I /91 )
President
Council on Library Resources

Sidney Verba
Director
Harvard University Library

William J. Welsh (resigned 10/90)
Deputy Librarian of of Congress
(retired)

STAFF

Patricia Battin
President

Rowland C. W. Brown
Consultant

Patricia Cece
Communications Assistant

Margaret S. Child
Consultant

Pamela M. Davis
Administrative Assistant

Henry W. Riecken
Senior Program Advisor

Hans Rüttimann
Consultant

Maxine K. Sitts
Program Officer

Commission on Preservation and Access
1400 16th Street, NW, Suite 740
Washington, DC 20036-2217
(202) 939-3400
September 1991

The Commission on Preservation and Access was established in 1986 to foster and support collaboration among libraries and allied organizations in order to ensure the preservation of the published and documentary record in all formats and to provide enhanced access to scholarly information.

Additional copies are available at no cost while supplies last. Submitted to ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center).

CPA Annual Report: 1990 – 1991

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

INTRODUCTION

ORGANIZATION SUPPORT AND 1990-91 INITIATIVES

BACKGROUND

OPERATION AND STAFFING

SUPPORT

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

SPECIAL REPORT THE AGONY OF CHOICE: STRATEGIES FOR PRESERVATION AND SCHOLARSHIP

TECHNICAL ASSESSMENT

THE INTERNATIONAL PROJECT

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

ARCHIVES

THE BRITTLE BOOKS PROGRAM

Federal Support for Brittle Books 1990-91

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND IMPROVEMENT OF MATERIALS

INSTITUTIONAL INITIATIVES

COMMUNICATION

NEWSLETTER CIRCULATION

PUBLICATION PRINCIPLES

1991 – USE OF THE GIANT BRITTLE BOOK EXHIBIT

APPENDIX

PUBLICATIONS AND REPORTS

PUBLISHED BY THE COMMISSION

PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE

REPRINTS

COLLABORATIVE PUBLICATIONS

COMMITTEES AND TASK FORCES

TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT ADVISORY COMMITTEE

COLLEGE LIBRARIES COMMITTEE

SCHOLARLY ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON ART HISTORY

SCHOLARLY ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON HISTORY

SCHOLARLY ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON PHILOSOPHY *

SCHOLARLY ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON MODERN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

SCHOLARLY ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON MEDIEVAL STUDIES

JOINT TASK FORCE ON TEXT AND IMAGE

TASK FORCE ON PRESERVATION EDUCATION

SOCIETY OF AMERICAN ARCHIVISTS TASK FORCE ON PRESERVATION

ASSESSMENT AND REVIEW COMMITTEE

NATIONAL ADVISORY COUNCIL ON PRESERVATION

THE COMMISSION ON PRESERVATION AND ACCESS

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

STAFF

SPECIAL REPORT
THE AGONY OF CHOICE: STRATEGIES FOR PRESERVATION AND SCHOLARSHIP