Managing Preservation for Libraries and Archives

Current Practice and Future Developments

John Feather

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351920476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Museum Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The preservation of library and archival materials can encompass everything from bookbinding and paper repair to new techniques for maintaining and exploiting digital text, sound or images. Managing Preservation for Libraries and Archives brings together an international team of contributors presenting the latest findings on key areas of preservation and addressing the most common storage and retrieval problems for different types of media. The authors also revisit traditional preservation and conservation approaches and suggest how to develop policies for the future. First summarising historical developments, the book sets out key preservation principles, rationales for selecting materials for preservation, and how to choose the best methods. Different contributors report on state-of-the-art preservation techniques for paper media and sound archives, explain how the appropriate techniques can be applied and how storage and access can best be managed in the long term. Later chapters analyse the benefits and problems of digitising different types of materials; the long-term viability of digital media; issues of access to digital surrogate documents as opposed to the original medium; and the challenges in the digital context of bibliographical control, cataloguing, metadata, distribution and copyright protection. An extensive chapter on international information sources provides signposting to a wealth of guidance on the latest techniques. Managing Preservation for Libraries and Archives will guide readers working in the library, archives, museum and heritage sectors through the choices between digital and traditional preservation techniques, and prepare them for likely future developments in managing both preservation and access.

Preface

The management of preservation in libraries and archives is a wide-ranging and rapidly developing field. Some of its techniques - of book binding and paper repair, for example - are as old as the documents to which they are applied. Others are so new as to be barely defined, as we seek methods to preserve the vast quantities of digital data - including sound and moving images as well as text - which are being used to generate data to add to the undiminished flow of printed paper which pours into libraries and record offices.

In this book, an international group of contributors offer authoritative views on policy matters, and discuss both state-of-the-art and well-proven methods of preservation and conservation. A number of experts from around the world have contributed chapters in their own fields of specialism in which they present some of the latest findings in those fields, and address the problems and issues which arise from contemporary techniques of information storage and retrieval. At the same time, traditional preservation and conservation are not neglected, either at the level of the repair of individual items or in terms of how to develop policies which will ensure both preservation and access for the future. A later chapter takes the form of an analytical survey of the rapidly growing literature in the field, and the final chapter looks to the future.

I am grateful to all the contributors for their chapters, and owe a special debt of gratitude to my long-time friend and colleague Graham Matthews of the University of Central England. He has not merely made an important contribution to this book but also made himself available for discussion of its content. His advice and help have, as always, been invaluable.

John Feather
Loughborough University

1 Introduction: principles and policies

John Feather

Introduction

Everything we have inherited from the past has come down to us because it has been preserved. This may have been intentional or accidental. It may have been incidental to the reason why the work or artefact was created, or it may have been integral to its purpose and function. A work created for short-term use, accidentally preserved for longer than was originally intended, and perhaps lost and rediscovered, may become an object whose long-term preservation has become desirable by reason of its form, content or rarity, or simply its age. Regardless of the history of an individual work or object, it now forms part of the larger entity which we call our 'heritage'.

The value of heritage can be defined in many ways. Some heritage has a value that can be expressed in financial terms, in the sense that a market exists in which the object can be bought and sold. Monetary worth alone, however, is not usually taken as the defining value of heritage. Less tangibly, but very powerfully, heritage is seen as defining a person, a group, a region, a nation or even the whole human race. The very concept of nationhood is understood in cultural terms, and in terms of an inheritance which has defined that culture over centuries. Where none exists it may have to be invented; powerful myths linking the past and the present can be potent weapons to be used for good or ill.

Inheritance is the essence of heritage, but its custodians must concern themselves with what the future will inherit from the present as well as with what the present has inherited from the past. This is not a passive process of transmission without change. Each generation makes its own contribution to the interpretation of the past, and leaves its own mark on the future. One of the key contributions of the generation which spanned the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first will surely be the development of new technologies of information and communication, which have created a new medium for information storage and transmission and at the same time have facilitated the development of new techniques of heritage management and conservation. Some would argue that at the turn of the millennium a profound cultural transformation is taking place, often repudiating the past and yet ineradicably growing out of it.

Heritage, then, consists of more than merely the objects which we have inherited from the past. It also includes the ideas and sentiments which have been handed down to us, sometimes imperfectly and sometimes with distortions, but often with the power to continue to influence the way we live as individuals and as societies and nations. Oral transmission, by word of mouth from generation to generation, is an integral part of this process even in the most literate and technological cultures, but material objects and written texts play a critical part. At the same time, the received heritage is changed and augmented as it is handed on to future generations. To understand the issues which surround the preservation of materials in libraries and archives — the central theme of this book—we must begin by placing both the materials and the institutions in this broader context of cultural heritage.

Cultural Heritage and the Documentary Heritage

Material Heritage

Cultural heritage is understood to mean everything that has been transmitted from the past which informs us about how people lived, worked and thought, and may still influence the way in which we do those things. The material heritage covers a huge range of artefacts. At one end of the scale, we have buildings and even whole landscapes which have been made and used over many generations. Some may survive only in part, or have been subjected to many modifications over the centuries by many hands and for many reasons. On the other hand, there are tiny but sometimes hugely informative objects, such as the flint tools which give us insights into the lives of our most remote ancestors, or the domestic objects which can be so evocative of past lifestyles.

Documentary Heritage

The documentary heritage, which is the focus of this book, has to be seen in this wider context of our material inheritance from the past. It consists essentially of documents which contain texts and images intended to convey information and ideas. The purpose of these images varies considerably, from a purely factual record to a text designed principally as a work of art. The visual presentation of the material may be central to its purpose, or of no relevance whatsoever. The format of the information container may be of intrinsic interest, or may be wholly irrelevant to understanding the content. An insight into the purpose of both the content and the container is therefore essential if the essence of the work is to be preserved.

Books and other documents

The physical form of the information is our starting-point. Throughout this chapter, the word 'document' will be used as a comparatively neutral term for all information carriers, regardless of format or medium. In practice, of course, format and medium are by no means irrelevant to the preservation and transmission of their contents, and we must take them fully into account. The most familiar information-carrying documents are books, which are so integral to our literate culture as to need no definition. It is important, however, to remember that for our purposes the word 'book' is being used to define a particular kind of document. It consists of folded sheets, sewn or glued together and usually (but not necessarily) contained in some kind of outer casing or binding to which they are attached by thread or adhesive. This is the classic form of the book, or codex, in widespread use in the western world for most of the last two millennia. The information content on the folded sheets may have been written by hand, produced in a printing press, be the end-product of a photographic process or be the output of an electronic system. In each of these cases, however, although the process of production does have an impact on the preservation of the artefact, the material and mechanical object is the same.

This remains the case even if the book is a later creation than its own contents. Libraries, for example, have traditionally taken a number of parts of a serial publication and bound them together. The end-product is treated very differently in many ways from a monograph published and bought as a single item. In cataloguing, storage and, indeed, in use, serials and monographs are very different from each other. Physically, however, there is no meaningful distinction between a monograph bound by the publisher as part of the production process, and a book created by bringing together the parts of a serial into an annual volume. An understanding of the issues that face libraries in preserving their contents must begin with an understanding of the physicality of the materials involved. This phenomenon is not confined to libraries. Archives also contain what are, in physical terms, books, when documents are mounted in guard books or similar protective devices. Many manuscripts, of course, are in precisely the same codex form as the printed books which largely supplanted them from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards. Materials, contents and methods of production may differ between manuscripts and printed books — sometimes profoundly—but the basic mechanics of all codices are essentially identical.

Codices are not, however, the only written or printed documents in libraries and archives. There are also single sheets which are not folded or bound in the codex format. Groups of these may be held together in some way (using thread, pins, staples and various other devices), or they may be genuinely separate sheets. Although there are printed single sheets—many of great historical importance —probably most of the single-sheet material is in manuscript, and is to be found in record offices and archives rather than libraries.

Artefacts and information carriers

Almost all documents were created because of their contents rather than their form. It is therefore important to distinguish between the document as artefact and the document as information carrier. As an artefact, a document in any format is a physical object, part of whose interest lies in its information content. As an information carrier, a document is a device for storing and transmitting its contents and the format is of interest only to the extent that it contributes to, or inhibits, that objective. This distinction is critical, for it underlies many of the ways in which librarians and archivists approach the task of preservation. If the interest of the document lies primarily in its information content, then the artefact may be considered dispensable provided that the information content is preserved. In practice, this is how much of the literature of the past has been transmitted to us. We have, for example, no manuscript of any complete play by Shakespeare, and only a comparatively small number of copies of the first printed editions survive. With the exception of a handful of scholars, no one has read Shakespeare in those early printed editions for centuries, because the works (usually edited but sometimes photographically reproduced) have been transferred to other artefacts in which they are (in several senses) more easily accessible.

The example of Shakespeare has been chosen deliberately because of the many complex issues which it raises. Generations of scholarly endeavour have been devoted to trying to ensure the accuracy and authenticity of the text, but there is still no final agreement on many issues, including some fundamental principles of editing and presentation. Other literary examples could be adduced which would further complicate the issue, especially of works which survive only in manuscripts written (or rather copied) many years or even centuries after the text was composed. This is precisely the case with many of the Greek and Latin classics, and indeed much of the vernacular literature of medieval Europe, both sacred and secular writings in the Jewish and Islamic traditions, and much of the surviving written material from the traditional cultures of south and east Asia. The value of the surviving artefacts lies in the evidence they offer of the information content created by the author; indeed, textual scholars refer to such documents as 'witnesses'. But many have also acquired an artefactual value simply because they are rare, and indeed have become commercially valuable. Some may even be of aesthetic interest because of their calligraphy, illustrations or historic bindings, or of interest as historical objects because of the history and past ownership of the artefact itself. There are many and complex reasons for wishing to preserve both the artefact and its contents.

We should not, however, fall into the trap of assuming that all artefacts are of equal interest, an assumption which has sometimes significantly influenced the approach of librarians and others to the preservation of documents. The fundamental fallacy in this approach is perhaps best understood by suggesting a similar approach to content, and thus suggesting that the information in all documents is equally valuable. This is clearly untrue, even though at the time of creation it has to be presumed that the content was of interest and concern to the creator. The significance of a document, both an as artefact and as an information carrier, is determined by its form and content, by its age, and by its intrinsic, as opposed to monetary, value. That value judgement is, of course, one of great difficulty and sensitivity. Librarians and archivists rightly err on the side of caution, but that does not exempt them from the duty of gaining an awareness and understanding of the issues involved.

The balance between the significance of the artefact and the significance of its information content effectively determines whether preservation activity is to focus on the former or the latter. If the content is deemed to be the principal point of interest, then it may be appropriate — and perhaps even necessary — to transfer it into some other format or medium to ensure its continued survival and accessibility. In a sense, it was printing that was the first technique for format conversion, as this process is sometimes called. During the first fifty years or so after the new technique was developed, thousands of ancient and medieval texts, previously only in manuscript formats, were put into print. At the same time, and increasingly so over the next five hundred years, new works were written which were intended to be printed, so that the manuscript was seen only as a temporary device which enabled the author to make the work available to the printer. In the last hundred and fifty years, however, a whole range of new media has been developed which has allowed the principle of format conversion to be carried forward in a quite different way. The first, and in some ways still the most important, was photography. In particular, the development of 35mm film and subsequently of other microphotographic formats in the 1920s and 1930s made it possible for librarians and archivists to transfer the information content of large numbers of documents in all other formats into one in which it seemed that the information content was not disturbed, and even the appearance of the original artefact (though not its material form) was preserved. The creation of photographic surrogates - as they are generically called - remains a significant, though increasingly controversial, strategy to preserve the information content of documents in archives and libraries. More recently, and equally controversially, and with great cost and less technical certainty, the conversion of analogue information content into digital formats has offered a superficially attractive alternative route to format conversion for preservation and access.

Heritage Institutions

Cultural heritage is generally understood to belong to a whole society, even though particular artefacts may bel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Index