Exploring

Selection for Preservation

As you have seen, "preservation" refers to all the activities undertaken by an institution to ensure that its collections survive in usable condition for as long as they are needed. While this sounds relatively simple, the process of deciding what to preserve and how to preserve it can be complicated and challenging. Which materials will be important in the future? What items or collections should be preserved, and how?

Even with a national cooperative microfilming effort, cultural institutions with paper-based collections have increasingly realized that it is not possible to preserve every brittle item. As a result, various strategies have been developed for selecting collections for preservation.

This section will explore the various criteria that you should consider when selecting collections for preservation action. Once you have decided what materials merit preservation, the choice of preservation method will depend on the intellectual content, the physical characteristics, and the condition of the materials. As you move through the other sessions of this course, you will learn more about evaluating the condition of your collections and choosing the appropriate preservation method(s).

The key to making effective selection decisions is to realize that:

• you cannot save everything (even with cooperative projects);
• priorities must be set among collections (e.g., you must define your collection's strengths and concentrate on them); and
• every item may not need to be preserved (e.g., will a representative sample of certain materials be acceptable?).