New Techniques in Preservation

For the past year the AHA Research Division has been reviewing the problem of what to do about materials (manuscript, book, and oth­er) printed or written on acidic paper. After a period of time, sometimes within two decades of normal library use, a book or collection will become “brittle” and eventually deteriorate and become unusable. Since most books pub­lished in the last 125 years use acidic paper, the scope and urgency of the problem is almost overwhelming. But efforts are under way to do something about the problem, and the Research Division urged the reprinting of the article below in Perspectives. This article is reprinted with permission from Humanities, August 1985, a bimonthly review published by the National Endowment for the Human­ities.

The survival of documentary materials, the written records of human activity and thought, has always been a risky matter. What we know of man’s past depends to a great extent on the frag­ments that escaped the accidents of war, natural disaster, sheer carelessness, and the inevitable disintegration of organic matter over time. Periodic waves of de­liberate destruction for religious or ideological reasons have also obliterated substantial portions of the historical and cultural record. The advent of modern industrialized society has aggravated some of these destructive factors. Not only are our wars more devastating, but air pollution takes its toll of paper and bindings just as it does of people and buildings. Moreover, major changes oc­curred in the mid-nineteenth century in the raw materials and methods used to produce paper in order to bring more books, journals, and newspapers to an increasingly literate population and to provide paper products of all kinds for industrial and commercial uses. These changes in papermaking greatly in­creased its vulnerability to the ravages of time.

Happily, technology, in addition to being the primary cause of our current problem, also provided some remedies for it. Techniques for transferring the information stored in books, journals, archives, and manuscripts to microform have been perfected over the past few decades. If archival quality film is used and if it is carefully processed and prop­erly stored, microfilm or fiche will last for centuries. Another new technology, digital storage, particularly optical digi­tal disc, is currently being explored as a promising new approach to reformatting information now available only on deteriorating paper, film, or magnetic tape. There are also available at least two tested methods for deacidifying pa­per that has not yet become embrittled, thereby doubling its life expectancy. Fi­nally, standards have recently been is­sued for permanent durable paper, and there is growing commitment within the publishing industry to using such paper, especially for scholarly publications.

Thus, Americans living in the latter half of the twentieth century are in the unique position of being able to deter­mine what among the great stores of knowledge, which have accumulated in our research libraries and archives, is to be passed on to our children’s grand­children. Curiously, however, this op­portunity for shaping the intellectual heritage we will leave to our descendants has not yet been widely recog­nized and acted upon.

The reasons for this are complicated. First, most Americans expect consumer goods of all kinds to disintegrate more or less rapidly and to be easily replace­able, often by a technologically im­proved product. Scholars therefore have expected the literature in their fields either to be reprinted or to be miraculously saved in the nick of time by some new technological break­ through. Secondly, the technology which has been available since the 1930s for such rescue operations has never won the hearts of users. Microforms have great advantages: they are relative­ly cheap to produce and very cheap to replicate; they are easy to store; they are very durable when properly cared for. But they are not very easy or pleasant to use. Microform readers have been awk­ward to manipulate and uncomfortable to sit at for long periods of time. It is hard to take notes at most reader sta­tions, and printers have been less than satisfactory. The machines tend to break easily and have often not been well maintained by libraries. Moreover, many microforms have not been cata­logued, and so they are difficult for readers to locate. Although microforms will probably never enjoy the popularity of the codex, in recent years great im­provements have been made in both film and fiche readers, libraries have paid more attention to providing com­fortable work stations for users; and increasing bibliographical control has facilitated access.

Despite these improvements, there remains considerable psychological resistance on the part of readers to any plan to transfer a substantial portion of the holdings of the nation’s libraries and archives to microform. In the past few years this resistance has been reinforced by the emergence of digital disc technol­ogy  which holds out at least a hope of providing a more attractive medium for long-term information storage. Optical digital discs are enticing because they have the potential for offering very high resolution images of all kinds, displayed either on high resolution Cathode Ray Terminals (CRTs) or in hard copy. They also offer random access search­ing; the possibility of storing written materials, photographs, and other im­ages and sound recordings in a single medium; and electronic transmission to multiple work stations or sites. The fly in the ointment is that there are not as yet any operational systems in place in a library or archival environment that can provide hard data on the reliability or cost effectiveness of disc as a preserva­tion medium. The Library of Congress began a pilot program more than three years ago to investigate “the use of new user technologies—analog video discs, compact digital audio discs, digital opti­cal discs, and . . . computers—for the storage, retrieval, and display or play­back of a wide variety of library materi­als.” {William J. Welsh, Library Resources of Technical Services, Jan./March, 1985). That program is now entering an opera­tional phase, and it is hoped that de­tailed information on technical prob­lems, managerial issues, and especially costs will be made widely available to the library community. The Public Archives of Canada is also about to embark on a program to transfer its holdings, beginning with machine-readable data, to digital disc storage. Here again, howev­er, it will be some time before data on the technical, administrative, and fiscal implications of the program will be available for public evaluation.

In the meantime, probably for a peri­od of up to five years, we are left with that good old reliable standby, micro­ form. An infrastructure of trained per­sonnel, available equipment, and opera­tional methodologies is in place to facili­tate large-scale filming projects. Long experience in a number of research libraries and historical societies and ar­chives as well as the careful data collec­tion undertaken by the Research Librar­ies Group cooperative preservation mi­crofilming project funded by NEH has provided solid figures on costs. Micro­filming also lends itself very well to cooperative projects in which the partic­ipants commit themselves to reporting the decision to film to a central bibli­ographic data base in order to prevent duplication of effort. Because of the low cost of making additional copies once a master negative and a copy master have been created, microform also offers the possibility of greatly increasing access to materials now available in only one or two repositories.

Moreover, it seems increasingly likely that both computer and optical scan­ning technology will soon be widely used to make the retrieval of informa­tion stored on microforms much faster and easier. “Computer-assisted retrieval of microimages uses the computer to store an index to all document images filed on the rolls of microfilm. This could mean millions of document im­ages in microfilm magazines stored in one access file. . . . The next step will be the transmission of microimages over the data transmission systems.” (Murray Astarita, Journal of Micrographics, March, 1983.) Thus, mass storage will continue to be primarily on microform, but re­trieval will be automated, and delivery will be not only on a conventional micro­form reader or in a printout from such a reader but also, after conversion to an electronic bit stream, on CRTs either locally or at remote sites. In addition, the electronic images may be encoded on an optical disc for distribution to users elsewhere.

The simple message to be derived from such attempts to predict the tech­nological future is that investment in microfilming now is not only safe but sensible because microforms can be easi­ly integrated into the systems likely to evolve in the coming years. Microforms are building blocks that can be used as the foundation for a wide range of system information storage, preserva­tion, and retrieval. Thus, there is no reason to delay a massive national effort to convert our deteriorating intellectual heritage to microform and every reason to begin.