The Big Picture: Preservation Strategies in Context
Building a National Preservation Program
Jeffrey M. Field
Deputy Director, Division of Preservation and Access, National Endowment for the Humanities

In a recent overview of preservation programs in the United States, Margaret Child observed that "the preservation movement … has been neither centralized nor systematically organized, but has instead been spontaneous, opportunistic, flexible, and multifaceted." In contrast to Child's 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 national preservation goals. A history and analysis of NEH's support for preservation from 1979 to the present will demonstrate that its grant-funded projects have greatly strengthened the capacity of institutions to care for their collections and have systematically preserved the content of significant humanities collections. The NEH 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 conception of national preservation goals to encompass the full range of the nation's cultural and research institutions in a national preservation program. Although drastic reductions in the Endowment's Congressional appropriations have slowed the progress of NEH-supported preservation programs, the future will see continued NEH support for core preservation activities. In addition, there is a growing interest in preserving the aural, visual, and multimedia collections that so distinctively characterize our recent history. Digital technology is rapidly becoming the platform of choice for access to this rich, non-textual heritage. To advance our capacity to ensure continuing access to digital collections -- textual and non-textual -- we will need to sustain a collaboration among multiple agencies and knowledge domains, as exemplified by NEH's partnership with the National Science Foundation in its Digital Library Initiative-Phase II, in order to support a robust research and demonstration program that will develop the standards and best practices required to certify the preservation worthiness of the new technology. NEH will continue to play a substantive role in addressing these new preservation challenges.