THE BIG PICTURE
Preservation Strategies in Context
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6. Building a National Preservation Program • National Endowment for the Humanities Support for Preservation
Jeffrey M. Field
In a recent overview of preservation programs in the
United States, Margaret Child described the development of a wide range
of activities that might be called "a national preservation program."
Child observed, however, that "the preservation movement . . . has been
neither centralized nor systematically organized, but has instead been
spontaneous, opportunistic, flexible, and multifaceted." She concluded
that "if there is something that deserves to be called a 'national
preservation program,' it is the totality of all the distinct and
distinctive preservation activities that have developed from grassroots
efforts across the country." [1] In contrast to this view, I
would like to show that the framework for a national preservation
program has been in place for a long time and that there has been
systematic progress toward achieving two major, national goals, namely,
the preservation of significant collections of source materials and the
development of an infrastructure for preservation. That infrastructure
must have, in turn, two components, the provision of education,
training, and information services and the pursuit of research and
demonstration leading to the creation of standards, best practices, and a
new preservation technology.
The desire to preserve endangered books and serials
has, since the 1960s, been an impetus for the formation of a national
preservation plan. With support from the Council on Library Resources in
1962, Gordon Williams proposed the creation of a central preservation
agency that would save an original copy of significant
books. [2] The Williams Report, endorsed by the Association of
Research Libraries (ARL) in 1965, was adopted as an action plan by the
Library of Congress, but the Library soon found that technical,
administrative, and fiscal problems inhibited its attempts to implement the
plan. [3] In the early 1970s, the ARL proposed that instead of
a single, national preservation collection, it would be more practical
to approach the problem through the coordinated action of a number of
individual research libraries. [4] Progress on this idea was
delayed until the mid-1980s, when bibliographic and
preservation microfilm standards and procedures had been further
developed. In 1985, the Council on Library Resources issued a report
that demonstrated the feasibility of undertaking a national
brittle-books preservation microfilming programa "divide and
conquer" strategy that lacked only the fiscal resources necessary to
undertake a national brittle-books campaign. In that same year, the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) established an Office of
Preservation, which was charged with supporting a "sustained and
coherent attack on the preservation problem."
As Margaret Child acknowledged in the examples cited
in her overview, the Endowment has been, since 1979, the nation's chief
source of federal support for preservation projects that have
strengthened the capacity of institutions to care for their collections
and preserved the content of significant humanities collections. The
National Endowment for the Humanities has successfully implemented programs
initially proposed in the national interest by scholarly and
professional organizations, and there has been a continual broadening
of the Endowment's national preservation goals to encompass the full
range of the nation's cultural and research institutions in the national
preservation program.
The guidelines published in 1986 for the Office of
Preservation articulated the first NEH preservation mission statement:
"The ability to study our cultural and intellectual heritage depends
upon the availability of primary and secondary sources documenting that
heritage. Vast numbers of these source documents are in imminent danger
of destruction due to the disintegration of the paper on which they were
printed or written or, in the case of nonprint resources, the deterioration
of the medium. To ensure that the information contained in the most
significant of these documents will be preserved and made available for
the continuing work of scholarship in the humanities, the Endowment has
established an Office of Preservation." [5]
In fact, the Endowment had provided support for
brittle-books microfilming projects for several years before the formation
of a special preservation office. In 1983, an NEH grant to the
Research Libraries Group initiated a cooperative preservation
microfilming project that became a model for the nationally coordinated
brittle-books preservation microfilming program, launched by the
Endowment in 1989, with the receipt of increased congressional
appropriations. [6] From 1989 to the present, NEH brittle-books
preservation microfilming grants have involved eighty-two
institutions in projects that have preserved the intellectual content of
approximately 1 million embrittled volumes, which include a large range
of subjects pertaining to United States history and culture.
The United States Newspaper Program (USNP) is a second
example of a systematic national effort to preserve humanities source materials. The idea for the program
originated in a report on scholarly needs presented to the Endowment
in 1972 by the American Council on Learned Societies. During the 1970s,
NEH grants to the Organization of American Historians led to the
formation of a national plan to preserve and provide bibliographic
access to newspaper collections throughout the country. Launched by the
Endowment in 1982, the USNP effort has now involved all the states, the
District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands in
projects that have created nearly 150,000 bibliographic records for
unique newspaper titles and microfilmed more than sixty million pages of
deteriorating newsprint.
A third collections-focused component of the national
program has involved support for the preservation of individual
archival and special collections. In this area, the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the Department of Education (through the former
Title II-C program), the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and
the National Historical Publications and Records Commission have
provided discretionary federal grants for projects that have preserved
hundreds of collections of textual and nontextual materials. Moreover,
since 1990, NEH grants to stabilize the storage environments for
material culture collections have protected twenty-nine million
objects in the nation's museums and historical organizations. The
inclusion of museums within its national purview further broadened the
reach of the Endowment's support for preservation.
Building the infrastructure to enhance preservation
practice has long been articulated as a national need. National
preservation plans promoted during the 1970s stressed the need to train
preservation personnel. In 1979, Paul Banks proposed the creation of a
graduate program for conservators and preservation administrators. With
assistance from an NEH grant, the program was initiated in 1981 at
Columbia University. Its graduates have joined (or created)
preservation departments at many of the nation's research libraries,
and they fill other important preservation posts. With sustained NEH
support since 1981, the program, now hosted by the University of Texas at
Austin, continues to produce well-trained preservation
professionalsa fitting memorial to its originator, who died in
2000. Through the Campbell Center for Historic Preservation Studies,
George Washington University, New York University, the State University
of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Delaware, NEH grants have
also supported training programs for museum conservators and
collections care staff.
Serving the preservation needs of research libraries
has been but one aspect of the Endowment's support for preservation. In
fact, that support has extended quite broadly across the country. Since
1980, when an NEH grant to the Northeast Document Conservation Center
established the nation's first preservation field service program, there
has been a steady increase in the geographic reach of preservation
service programs. A grant in 1980 also provided support for workshops
conducted by the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in
Philadelphia. In 1984, with NEH support, the Southeastern Library
Network initiated a preservation service program for its eleven-state
region. In 1990, the AMIGOS Bibliographic Service established a similar
program for an additional five states. In 1997, the Upper Midwest
Conservation Association, based in Minneapolis, established a
preservation field service program, which provides surveys, workshops,
disaster assistance, and information services to museums, historical
organizations, libraries, and archives in the region. A sixth,
Endowment-supported preservation field service program was begun in 2000
It the Balboa Art Conservation Center in San Diego, and discussions
have begun regarding the formation of a program for the Pacific
Northwest. These projects have reached thousands of
individuals, as the following statistics from the AMIGOS program
demonstrate: in the ten years from its inception in 1990 to 2000, AMIGOS
staff answered 9,420 telephone reference calls and, from 1996 to 2000,
responded to 3,588 e-mail messages; 5,126 persons attended state,
regional, and national information presentation, and, from 1993 to 2000,
3,636 persons participated in preservation and imaging workshops. In
addition, fifty-three institutions benefitted from on-site surveys and
preservation management consultations.
That NEH support for preservation would encompass a
wide range of institutions and activities was reconfirmed in fiscal
1989, when Congress provided the Endowment with a large increase in
appropriations for the Office of Preservation. Congressional interest in
the national preservation program had been sparked by testimony about
the brittle-books crisis presented in March 1988 by the Commission on
Preservation and Access. In response, Representative Sidney Yates, chair
of the Endowment's appropriations committee, asked the Endowment's
chairman how much money NEH would need to solve the brittle-books
problem. The chairman replied: "Your primary interest seems to be in
preserving brittle books. I want to emphasize, however, that brittle
books are only a part of the preservation problem. As you know, the
Endowment makes awards for many other types of preservation projects . .
. Any additional funds that are made available in fiscal 1989 should be
used to advance the entire range of preservation activities, not just
the microfilming of brittle books." [7] This statement
successfully articulated the need for a broadly conceived, national
preservation program, and Congress concurred.
Regional preservation service programs supported by
the National Endowment for the Humanities carry out an aspect of the
national preservation program that extends the reach of
preservation knowledge and training to individuals in
a wide variety of institutions that hold materials important for understanding
local and regional history and culture. To make an even deeper
impact on the ability of local institutions to care for their
collections, in 2000 the Endowment initiated a new category of support
for Preservation Assistance Grants (PAG), which provide up to $5,000 for
training, on-site consultations, and the purchase of basic preservation
supplies and equipment. In July 2000, the Endowment made 132 PAG awards
to institutions in forty-one states, the District of Columbia, and
Puerto Rico.
Reflecting the Endowment's service to the many
audiences that benefit from the use of cultural and historical collections,
NEH guidelines in use today refer to preserving resources that assist
"research, education, and public programming in the humanities and that
are of critical importance to our cultural heritage." During the 1990s,
educators encouraged the use of primary source documents in K-12
curricula. Television documentaries, such as Ken Burns's Civil War
series, have made highly visible use of manuscripts and historical
photographs. Museums have a long history of interpreting primary sources
for the public. Preserving humanities resources is integrally connected
with enhancing teaching and learning, inside and outside the
classroom.
Since 1979, our collective capacity to preserve
resources has been greatly enhanced by research and demonstration
projects, such as those conducted by the Image Permanence Institute
(IPI) at the Rochester Institute of Technology. With NEH support since
1980, IPI projects have resulted in national standards for photographic
enclosures, new techniques for enhancing the longevity of microfilm, and
scientifically sound approaches to establishing proper temperature and
humidity conditions for the storage of museum and library collections.
Recent work by the institute on environmental conditions
has incorporated the isobar concept developed in the
research laboratory of the Library of Congress by Don Sebera. The
Library has also, through its pursuit of mass deacidification,
stimulated the private sector's development of an effective process to
deacidify books and manuscripts. After twenty years of promise, the
nation's research institutions finally have a dependable way to arrest
the acid deterioration of paper-based materials. It is
unfortunate, however, that whereas research library organizations, such
as ARL and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), have
persuaded the university press community to use acid-free paper in
their publications, it would seem that the commercial press has not
readily adopted permanent, durable paper for its out put.
The preservation community is also supported by a
vast and continually growing corpus of published information. In a
review of preservation publications produced between 1993 and 1998,
Sophia Jordan remarked that preservation has "come of age," as witnessed
by the spread of preservation departments and the diversity and depth of
topics covered by preservation literature, Jordan also points out that
in that period, "the greatest change in the publication and
dissemination of preservation literature has been the advent of the
World Wide Web." [8] Numerous preservation departments and
regional preservation service organizations maintain
information-rich, preservation Web sites. The Council on Library
and Information Resources has also been instrumental in supporting and
disseminating through the Internet studies and information regarding
national preservation and access issues. Moreover, the general public
has been alerted about national issues in these areas through two
filmsSlow Fires and Into the Future,that have
been broadcast on public television and widely circulated among research
institutions.
Preservation is, however, but one aspect of a set of
interrelated activities designed, ultimately, to increase
the availability of resources for current and future use. When the
Endowment made its first grants for preservation projects, it was
through a program in its Research Division that also provided support to
create access to collections. The creation of a separate Office of
Preservation in 1985 was, at that time, a highly beneficial action that
helped focus national attention on the preservation crisis. With the
creation of the Division of Preservation and Access in 1992, the
Endowment reintegrated these two closely related activities. In today's
dynamically charged information society, the use of digital technology
to enhance access to collections has become a paramount goal of
research and cultural institutions, and a new set of challenges
confronts the preservation community.
With skills and experience in the reformatting of
fragile materials, preservation professionals are now called upon to
direct digital production projects. But digitization is not yet a
reliable preservation process. Advances in our capacity to ensure
continuing access to digital collections will depend upon a
collaboration among multiple federal agencies, the national research
library organizations, and diverse knowledge domains to sustain a
robust program of research and demonstration projects that will develop
the standards and best practices required to certify the preservation
worthiness of the new technology. Toward this end, the NEH has joined
other federal agencies in support of the Digital Library
InitiativePhase II, conducted by the National Science Foundation.
The Endowment's participation in the initiative ensures that projects
designed to resolve the critical and distinctive issues posed by the
digitization of humanities collections are included in this important
national effort.
It is interesting to note that in characterizing the
notion of "digital preservation," we speak or write about ensuring
"continuing access to digital collections." In using this
locution, we acknowledge that, with reference to digital
technology, preservation and access are fused, because preservation
becomes the ability over the long term to retrieve and reproduce digital
information. This is why the creation of metadata standards for digital
objects is such an integral part of developing a digital preservation
program.
Digital technology is particularly well suited for
the capture and dissemination of nontextual sources, such as photographs
and audiovisual materials. As Janet Gertz has observed, "Instead
of 'just' trying to solve the brittle paper problem, we now have the
potential to convert other media we have avoided for many years, and to
do it with a technology that users actively like." [9] But what
are the best formats for audio or video longevity? Advances in these
areas, particularly with respect to digital reformatting of audio and
visual materials, are being developed by the Library of Congress for the
operations of its new Culpeper facility.
To address the pressing need to preserve and provide
access to audio recordings in the field of folklore and ethnomusicology,
the American Folklife Society, with support from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, convened a symposium on "Folklife
Collections in Crisis" in cooperation with the American Folklife Center.
The symposium took place at the Library of Congress in December 2000. We
should not forget however, that there is more to learn about how best to
preserve the books and serials that will continue to constitute the vast
majority of holdings in research libraries. For example, when Nicholson
Baker claimed that bound newspapers do not deteriorate, where was the
research report to settle his claim? Abby Smith has cited a number of
pressing research needs in these areas, including a study of the
microclimate within a bound volume. [10]
Although drastic reductions in the Endowment's
congressional appropriations since 1996 have slowed the progress of
NEH-supported preservation programs, the future will
see continued NEH support for core national preservation programs, and
the Endowment will continue to serve as one of the primary sources of
support for projects that implement the national preservation and access
agenda.
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