Cultural Heritage at Risk: Today's Stewardship Challenge
Werner Gundersheimer
Director, Folger Shakespeare Library

My paper will apply Edward Tenner's theory concerning the unintended consequences of technological innovation to issues affecting library collections. In reviewing recent, highly publicized critiques of preservation strategies -- particularly those of Nicholson Baker -- it will try to bring some clarity to the complex choices librarians face regarding artifactual and content-based preservation. It also raises the question of how the culture of a technologically oriented but grossly underfinanced professional community may have affected some of our past efforts to manage change responsibly, as well as our stance when we don't get things quite right; and it offers a suggestion or two as to how we might do better going forward.