Preservation: LIS 556, Spring 2006, Tuesdays 3:10-5:50

This class is scheduled to meet in SCILS Building room 203. [The assignment to Hardenbergh Hall has been changed.]

Welcome! This class is about preservation, but at a high level: planning, organizing, and understanding the issues. Although the general class topics are sketched out I'm deliberately not assigning them to days until the dates of the visits to actual laboratories are settled. We may also, in addition to the off-site visits, have a few class meetings entirely online. [The reason is that if we could get this course into the online format then the teacher could come from anywhere and we wouldn't have so much trouble finding an instructor.] This is not a class in book repair: there are specialist programs in becoming a conservator.

Libraries are about both preservation and access. We collect and preserve for the next generation; we provide access for the current users. Unfortunately these goals are sometimes in conflict: the more some things are used, the more likely they are to be damaged. And preservation of an object divides roughly into conservation and copying; that is, we can either try to repair a physical object or we can try to find a substitute. Repair is expensive; but buying a copy of an old book means, typically, that you buy one fewer new book. To the extent you can, you want to take preventive measures, so that fewer books will fall apart.

So the themes of this course are:

1. How should you manage your holdings to minimize loss?
2. How should you mitigate loss when it happens?

There is no textbook, since I am a great believer that everything is on the web. A particularly informative website is the site of the Northeast Document Conservation Center. But you should know that ALA publishes a book by Paul Banks and Roberta Pilette, Preservation: Issues and Planning, which is pretty much the most commonly used text in the field.

1. Overview and history
2. Paper; deacidification
3. Storage, environmental controls
4. Mold, insects and vermin
5. Microfilming
6. Digital scanning (i.e. digital to preserve analog)
7. Care of photographs, sound recording, cinema and video recordings.
8. Digital preservation (how to keep digital around)
9. Saving the Web
10. Ephemera and other special materials
11. Duplicating a book
12. Exhibition techniques
13. Physical security
14. Disaster planning
15. Selection
16. Retention schedules
17. Funding sources
18. Summary

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19. Visit to Monmouth College preservation lab
20. Visit to Princeton preservation lab
21. Visit to Rutgers preservation lab
22. Visit to Ocker & Trapp bindery

Some topics, such as retention schedules, are likely to be relegated to exercises or stuffed into multiple-topic lectures.