Preservation Training for All Librarians

In the January 1989 (No. 36) issue I reported on a talk given at the TAPPI conference by Jerome Brezner about killing insects in books with microwaves. Surely, I reasoned, the astute professionals who are my readers will not jump to hasty conclusions. Surely they will heed my cautions and those of Dr. Brezner and not try what is still an experimental method. Well, I think that I was right, but these experiments have been reported more widely and been disseminated to those who are apparently less cautious. Several people in the field have had to discourage well-meant enthusiasts from trying these procedures. This is unfortunate. We work in a field where prudence is more than a virtue, it is a necessity. Inactivity, at the other extreme, is our greatest foe. We cannot know everything so all action involves some risk. The best we can do is minimize those risks. The desire to use partially tested techniques stems from an ignorance of preservation principles and a simplistic view of preservation problems and solutions. These are shortcomings that most libraraians suffer from because they have not received an adequate education to prepare them to act responsibly in preservation matters.

Which leads us in the usual circuitous manner to our question:

Q: Should all librarians be taught preservation?

A: Yes, of course. At the risk of preaching to the converted allow me to set out my reasons.

As someone who came to preservation through bench work and having worked only in research libraries, I have tended to think of preservation as object driven. That is, when looking at preservation choices I would think of the nature and condition of the material to be preserved as the most important determining factors in preservation planning and decision making. This is also true of most of the preservation literature. Perhaps that is because preservation has been for so long and so thoroughly the province of research libraries and archives. Various as the institutions gathered under those names are, they share a number of purposes and objectives which direct and give form to their preservation activities. Because so many of the underlying assumptions upon which preservation decisions are made are held in common they tend to go unexamined.

In the last two years I have been forced to examine many of those underlying assumptions because my wife and I have been teaching a course in preservation in the Division of Library and Information Science at St. John's University. As all teaching activity tends to be, this has been at least as instructive to the instructors as the students. None of our students expect to become preservation administrators and few expect to work in research libraries. Most are on track for public and school librarianship. This has caused us to spend a good deal of time thinking and talking about the role of preservation in all kinds of libraries. We had to come up with a definition of preservation that was applicable to any context. The formulation that we use is almost embarassingly simple but, I feel, admirably straightforward. "Preservation is the activity that attempts to keep what you want and need for as long as you want or need it." There are several things I like about using this definition as the context for teaching and discussing preservation. It gives a clear and clearly good goal--one that does not require argument or justification. It avoids questions of medium and is equally applicable to artifacts and intellectual content. It defines preservation as an active pursuit and not a passive reaction. Finally and most importantly it accomodates the need for each library to tailor the scope and direction of their preservation activities to their particular nature and need.

There has been a long-standing and implicit presumption that public and school libraries do not need to actively preserve their collections because they last long enough on their own. Preservation professionals have never trusted this assumption and the Wellesley Free Library has gathered impirical data to disprove it. (See Reynolds, Anne L., Schrock, Nancy C. and Walsh, Joanna; "Preservation: the Public Library Response" Library Journal, 114:3 (February 15, 1989), pp. 128-132.)

The forms and patterns which preservation take outside the research institution setting are intriguing and enlightening. Maintenance in the form of repair and rebinding becomes very important especially as an alternative to purchasing replacements from inadequate budgets. Environmental concerns take on a different aspect in small library situations. One of our students wrote, as a term paper, a well reasoned argument based on preservation principles for moving a grammar school library out of damp cellar location. Another discussed plans for renovating a public library to solve preservation problems caused by lack of supervision and control of a book storage area. It was the general impression among ourselves and our students that heavy use is the cause of most damage in public and school libraries. (The findings of Reynolds, et al, p. 130, support this.) Therefore improving user understanding of the need for care in the use of library material is an important preservation tool in these institutions.

Efforts such as these underline the fact that preservation is a management activity that all librarians are likely engage in. Indeed, librarians in small libraries are more likely to be involved in such activity than those in large libraries where the labor is more finely divided into specialized tasks. The sooner and the better all librarians are taught to understand the principles and techniques of preservation the sooner they will be able to better manage their jobs and their collections.

We all have something to lose, including our misconceptions, our untested assumptions and our ignorance.

This article first appeared Conservation Administration News (CAN) No. 38, October 1989 as the Feature "Out of the Question." © 1992 by Robert DeCandido.