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Preserving cultural heritage: introduction.

Article Excerpt
When Library Trends devoted its first issue to preservation (Tauber, 1956), the state-of-the-art term was conservation, and the articles dealt with binding, treatments, stack maintenance, and "discarding" (weeding). The focus was almost entirely on libraries, except for an article by Hummel and Barrow on treatment for library and archival material (Hummel & Barrow, 1956). The next Library Trends issue devoted to preservation was published twenty-five years later (Lundeen, 1981), and although conservation was still the preferred term, the range of topics was broader. To binding and treatment were added new areas: administration, education, paper chemistry, disaster preparedness and prevention, microforms, and the conservation and preservation of sound recording and photographic collections. The focus was still squarely on libraries, with little mention of archives. This 1981 issue does, however, show the first signs of an interest in international collaboration and some cross-fertilization of ideas in Buchanan's article on disaster prevention (Buchanan, 1981).

In the last twenty-five years, "preservation" scholarship has evolved to a dual pursuit: the idea that we need to preserve and...

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