Caring for America's Library
Conclusion
Our intellectual culture is diverse, not only in its breadth of expression, but also in how it is recorded for current and future use. The Library's mission presents us with a dual challenge -- that of preserving the ideas of our culture and that of ensuring that these ideas are both readily and continuously available to an inquisitive public.
In an informed, democratic society, our ability to accomplish this task is the shared responsibility, not only of the staff and management of the Library of Congress, but of also sister cultural institutions, our legislature, and concerned citizens. Due to the sheer size of the collections, their diversity, and the various ways in which they deteriorate, the Library's preservation challenges are both large and complicated.
Like all organic things, library materials, in simplistic terms, begin deteriorating the moment they are made, some much more rapidly than others. In other words, all library materials are inherently unstable. More specifically, their internal chemical structure inevitably leads them to enter into one or more chemical, physical, or biological interactions with moisture, oxygen, ozone, atmospheric pollutants, or micro-organisms.
Therefore, our objective is to postpone the inevitable as long as we can, or to transfer the information to a longer lasting medium. Clearly, it is the mission of the Preservation Directorate to prolong the existence of the collections through activities that minimize chemical and physical deterioration and damage and that prevent loss of informational content.
We are engaged in a race against time. In keeping with what fatalists say about time being "our worst enemy," we can realize that time has a way of insulting both the most useful and the most beautiful things in life. One of the laws of nature seems to be that time does not need to cheat in order to win. Though time is the natural enemy of preservation staffs and the institutions they serve, we must acknowledge that human ingenuity, determination, hard work, and professional commitment are surely our allies. The future always struggles against being mastered, but in the field of preservation the Library of Congress and many other great cultural institutions worldwide are demonstrating that they are up to the challenge.