People, Buildings, and Collections: Innovations in Security and Preservation
What Can We Afford to Lose?
Abby Smith
Council on Library and Information Resources

As the intellectual and creative output of humankind grows exponentially, the burden of ensuring long-term access to information and cultural artifacts increases. Traditional means of conservation and preservation will continue to play a vital role in preserving artifactual collections, even as funding for those activities erodes. The strategies for digital preservation are not as well articulated: we are devising technical solutions to longevity, but the ultimate solutions will demand a type and degree of cooperation among libraries, museums, and archives that is unprecedented and currently appears unachievable.

While the maximalist demand to preserve essentially everything that has research value has enormous appeal, it is unrealistic to expect that we will not lose parts of our cultural heritage. If we agree that we cannot afford to lose the record of our past, how can we afford to save it? How do we assess what is at risk, and how does that assessment shape preservation programs, both local and national? If we cannot save everything of value, how do we decide what to protect and how to achieve that cost-effectively?

In this paper, I shall address the difficult choices that institutions and individuals face when taking action to preserve. It will propose a model for assessing what the value of collections is to the institution and its constituents, how that value changes over time, and how new technologies for creating, disseminating, and preserving information and cultural objects are changing our sense of the intrinsic value of library collections. Finally, I shall examine the critical issue of how we can measure our return on investment in preservation.