Abstract
For 20 years the U. S. Newspaper and Brittle Books Programs focused national resources on a singular approach to preserving acidic paper in research libraries—converting printed “information” to microfilm. In many cases, the original historical material was discarded in the process. This method failed to address the root problem that could have been solved more effectively and more economically through preventive conservation. Such conservation was ignored because an ulterior motive to the brittle books “crisis” was to establish a national digital library. A serious consequence arising from this subterfuge is that today mid-sized research libraries are not committed to—and perhaps fail to comprehend the importance of—preserving their general collections. Collectively these diverse, paper-based collections represent a huge swath of the nation’s historical record. Falsely believing digital media will make paper obsolete, and motivated by a need to create space in libraries, today’s vigorous weeding for non-rare, paper-based general collections threatens to destroy evidence that will be required for research and future digitization projects. These materials will be needed as backups to accurately regenerate screen copies; as master copies to augment, enhance, or correct faulty screen copies; and, as authentication to verify original production techniques and determine provenance. Without careful coordination and item-level verification, today’s isolated weeding practices could eviscerate American general collections with devastating results for future scholarship, repeating the mistakes of the U. S. Newspaper and Brittle Books Programs.
Article note
An early version of this paper was given as “What, No Backups? Preserving Hardcopy Newspapers” at the IFLA / WLIC 2014 Conference, Lyon, France, August 16, 2014.
About the author
Randy Silverman has been the preservation librarian at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library since 1993, and a book conservator since 1978. For thirty years he has consulted widely in the United States and internationally. Silverman is well known for his disaster recovery efforts. He teaches graduate courses in preservation for Emporia State University and the University of Arizona and has 80 professional publications. In 2013 Silverman received the Paul Banks and Carolyn Harris Preservation Award from the American Library Association and in 2016 he was awarded the Gardner Prize for outstanding academic contributions from the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters.
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