People, Buildings, and Collections: Innovations in Security and Preservation
James F. Williams, II
Dean of Libraries, University of Colorado, Boulder

The strategic stewardship of the nation's cultural resources assumes the existence of a national strategy to preserve and protect those resources. As we work to develop that strategy, we should be reminded through symposia such as this one that stewardship involves responsibility at the local level for the daily security and preservation of the vast historical and intellectual records of human experience -- records that are the foundation of all teaching, learning, scholarship, and discovery. The kind and content of risks to the resources of museums, archives, and research libraries dictate the need for coordinated national programs to preserve and protect. At a minimum, national stewardship responsibilities place a corresponding local responsibility on the museum, archive, and research library director for numerous critical functions: the safety of employees; the physical protection of buildings, their contents, and immediate surroundings; the establishment and implementation of protection programs related to natural disasters; the establishment and implementation of coordinated conservation and preservation programs; the establishment and implementation of an asset protection policy; the establishment and implementation of programs to audit asset and protection systems; and the establishment and implementation of training programs related to the obligations and responsibilities of staff in all safety and security matters. Stewardship of the nation's cultural resources also means that directors at the local level must anticipate risks to those resources and maintain safeguards to prevent predictable losses associated with those risks.

This paper focuses on the security and preservation of cultural resources located in the nation's research libraries, with discussions on the forms of and reasons for risk in these institutions, the major risk that is not associated with crime, and protection at the local level through policy development, safety and security systems, and adherence to standards and guidelines related to technological means of preservation and access. The paper concludes that best practice (based on best knowledge) dictates a primary compromise on the question of how much security is too much or too little in the research library environment. Further, it concludes that the compromise must provide for a reasonable level of stewardship and protection, while also offering the most reasonable level of access to our nation's cultural resources; a compromise that must be formalized in policy, founded on considerations of risk, and the use of innovative and effective countermeasures, which would usually be expected to offer the desired level of protection for the institution and its cultural assets.