The Evidence in Hand:
Report of the Task Force on the
Artifact in Library Collections
November 2001

COUNCIL ON LIBRARY AND INFORMATION RESOURCES
This report is one in a series from CLIR on

OPTIMIZING COLLECTIONS AND SERVICES FOR SCHOLARLY USEThe Evidence in Hand:
Report of the Task Forceon the Artifact in
Library Collections
Stephen G. Nichols, Chairman
Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections
Johns Hopkins University
Abby Smith
Director of Programs
Council on Library and Information Resources

November 2001

Council on Library and Information Resources
Washington, D.C.

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Cover image: “Scene in the Old Congressional Library, Washington, D.C., Showing Present Congested
Condition,” by W. Bengough. The illustration appeared in Harper’s Weekly on February 27, 1897. CLIR isgrateful to The Making of America Digital Collection, Cornell University Library, for providing thescanned image.

ISBN 1-887334-88-2

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8

The paper in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information
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Copyright 2001 by the Council on Library and Information Resources. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transcribedin any form without permission of the publisher. Requests for reproduction should be submitted to the Director of Communications
at the Council on Library and Information Resources.

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Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................................................................ v
TASK FORCE MEMBERS ........................................................................................................... ix
1.

THE PROBLEM ..................................................................................................................... 1
1.1
1.2

2.

THE ARTIFACT IN QUESTION ......................................................................................... 8
2.1
2.2

3.

The Charge ............................................................................................................. 5
The Work of the Task Force ................................................................................. 7

Selection for Preservation of the Original ......................................................... 9
Frameworks for Determining Value ................................................................ 12

STATES OF THE ARTIFACT, 1800–2000 .......................................................................... 17
3.1

The Changing Features of the Artifact ............................................................. 17

3.2

Print/Paper .......................................................................................................... 19
3.2.1 The Relative Stability of Imprints ......................................................... 19
3.2.2 Evaluation of the Artifact and Selection for Preservation ................ 23
3.2.3 Creating Surrogates: Filming versus Scanning .................................. 24
3.2.4 Responsible Retention Policies ............................................................. 28

3.3

Audiovisual ......................................................................................................... 30
3.3.1 Sound and Light as Artifacts ................................................................. 30
3.3.2 Still Images .............................................................................................. 33
3.3.3 Moving Images ....................................................................................... 35
3.3.4 Recorded Sound ...................................................................................... 38
3.3.5 Broadcast Media ..................................................................................... 40

3.4

Digital ................................................................................................................... 41
3.4.1 Artifacts and Artifactual Value in the Digital Realm ......................... 42
3.4.2 Digital Surrogates ................................................................................... 43
3.4.3 Access ....................................................................................................... 46
3.4.4 Born-Digital Materials ............................................................................ 47
3.4.5 Preservation of Digital Information ..................................................... 50
3.4.6 Copyright: A Barrier to Preservation? ................................................. 53

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4.

CASE STUDIES .................................................................................................................... 55
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5

5.

The Five-College Library Depository .............................................................. 55
The Emperor Jones ................................................................................................. 58
Preserving Oral Traditions ................................................................................ 61
JSTOR ................................................................................................................... 64
The Rossetti Archive ........................................................................................... 66

SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS ..................................................................... 70
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5

Principles of Good Stewardship ....................................................................... 72
Best Practices for Preservation of the Artifact ................................................ 72
Strategies for Specific Formats .......................................................................... 72
Recommendations .............................................................................................. 73
Areas for Further Research ................................................................................ 74

6.

REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................... 75

7.

APPENDIXES ..................................................................................................................... 82
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.

Current Library Practices in Collection Development and Preservation ... 83
Charge to the Task Force .................................................................................... 91
Selection for Preservation Criteria from RLG, Cornell, and Harvard ......... 93
Expenditure Trends in ARL Libraries, 1986–2000 .......................................... 99
Non-Print Holdings in ARL University Libraries ........................................ 100
Comparative Costs for Book Treatments ...................................................... 101
National Recording Preservation Act of 2000 ............................................... 104

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Executive Summary
The “information explosion” sparked by digital technology has fostered anincreasing awareness of the sheer mass of information available today in avariety of media, from traditional formats such as paper to the more recent
film, optical, and magnetic formats. Institutions charged with collecting, storing, preserving, and making accessible recorded information are struggling tokeep pace with the growth of information production, even though their brief
is to collect only a portion of what is published and an even smaller portionof what is produced and disseminated in unpublished form. With so muchinformation produced, how do members of the research community—scholars and teachers, librarians and archivists, and academic officers who support
their work—distinguish between what is of long-term value, what is ephemeral, and what of that ephemera is valuable for the preservation of a rich historical record?
Libraries have struggled with these questions for a long time, but the issue of how to understand and protect the value in research collections, in particular in the original, unreformatted materials in physical formats thatabound in libraries and archives, is more urgent than ever. The Council on
Library and Information Resources convened a task force of scholars, academic officers, librarians, and archivists to investigate the role of artifacts—
original, unreformatted materials—in libraries and archives as these institutions are creating digital collections and services to serve research andteaching functions. The task force members were asked to articulate a generalcontext or framework for formulating and evaluating institutional policies on
how best to preserve and make accessible artifactual collections and how toensure their continued access for research and teaching needs, however thoseneeds evolve.
The task force was charged to answer specifically these questions:• What qualities of an original are useful or necessary to retain in their original form? Under what circumstances are original materials required forresearch?
• When is it sufficient and appropriate to capture intellectual content
through reformatting and not necessarily retain the original?
• Which preservation options provide the most appropriate and cost-effective means of preserving the original?
• From both custodial and scholarly perspectives, what are the advantages
and disadvantages of these various preservation options?
Task force members addressed the needs of print and paper-based collections; of audiovisual materials, including still and moving images, recorded
sound, and broadcast media; and of digital formats, both those created fromanalog sources and those that are created and exist exclusively in digital form.

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The challenges to preserving artifactual collections are formidable. Artifacts are at risk because they are produced in high quantity; because they arerecorded onto unstable media that decay over time; and because the economics
of preservation result in preservation needs of collections competing less andless successfully with the access needs of users. Moreover, developing priorities for preservation actions on the basis of the research value of an object ischallenging because of the unknown and unfixed values of artifacts. The dynamic
nature of intellectual inquiry increases demand for some types of sources
while neglecting others, and competition among communities of interest can
result in difficult trade-offs.
Despite these challenges, a number of critical research functions will continue to depend on access to the original. The task force found that preservation budgets in research libraries have been flat—in real terms declining—since 1994, and that they often fail to meet the preservation needs of artifacts.
The attention given to increasing access through digital reformatting has thepotential to eclipse the preservation needs of artifacts and to preoccupy theattention of the research community. The needs of audiovisual materials seemparticularly serious, given their sheer number, the fact that relatively few institutions are collecting them in original form, and the fact that preservation
issues relating to these media are difficult and expensive to address. Scholars’
general lack of awareness of the value and endangered nature of these materials leaves them with few advocates for preservation resources.
The task force looked at traditional criteria used in selecting for preservation—age, rarity, associational value, evidentiary value—and found these criteria still valid. Because artifacts of evidentiary value often have little market
value and are found in multiple copies, decisions about their treatment andretention are often contested; for this reason, the task force focused chiefly onthese items. Artifactual collections that are paper-based or audiovisual haveevidentiary value to the extent that the original manifestation can attest to theoriginality, faithfulness (or authenticity), fixity, and stability of the content.
When the items are reformatted onto newer media for preservation or otherpurposes, those qualities inalienable to the original may be lost. When that isthe case, the artifact should be retained.
The report deals in detail with the ways in which artifacts and their physical frailties affect their research value—originality, faithfulness, fixity, andstability—over time and with how libraries can minimize the risk of unacceptable loss of that value. It investigates the specific issues around selected
media, such as paper-based printed matter, moving image and recorded
sound materials, and objects that exist in digital form, and points to two key
strategies currently in use in libraries that can be scaled up to deal with aproblem of this magnitude.
The first strategy is preventive maintenance, which most often entails storing items under optimal conditions to retard rates of natural decay. Prevention also includes such techniques as deacidifying items printed on woodpulp paper, stabilizing bindings and encasing fragile items, and improving
care and handling techniques for all library materials.
The second strategy is the use of surrogates to reduce the stress of handling. For research purposes, digital surrogates in particular were found to bequite acceptable, and were even preferable to the originals in a number of cases. Surrogates, especially when networked, have the added benefit of increas-

vii

ing access to an item and of providing convenience of access to items housed
at distant or disparate locations.
The task force acknowledges that both strategies have their drawbacks.
For preventive measures, the chief drawback may be that optimal storage
conditions are created only in closed-stack environments. This practice has
great benefit to the collections but can affect the ways in which researchers
gain access to them. With the use of surrogates, the drawbacks from the user’s point of view depend chiefly on the type of surrogate created, with digital scans and preservation photocopying being preferred to microforms. The
larger problem may be that, as preference for the convenience of surrogates
grows in the digital library, the continuing preservation needs of the source
artifacts may be eclipsed by the resource needs of creating and maintaining
digital files, the long-term costs of which are unknown.
Given the size of the collections that are of potential research value overtime, the desirability of ensuring that a meaningful number of them are preserved for present and future access purposes, and the desirability of maintaining the richest possible historical base of cultural and intellectual resources, the task force concluded that librarians and scholars need to build
economies of scale into preservation strategies.
Specific recommendations for these economies of scale for different media follow.

Print/Paper• Establish regional repositories to house and provide proper treatment of
low-use print matter. These repositories would provide access to artifacts
aggregated from different institutions under terms to be worked out. Suchrepositories might begin by taking in journals and monographs that are
widely available in digital form.
• Convene a national group to investigate the establishment of archival repositories that would retain a “last, best copy” of American imprints.
• Build interinstitutional networks of information sharing about the status ofartifacts and delegation of responsibilities for caring for them. These networks would obviate unwanted duplication and encourage libraries totake responsibility for the preservation of their most important or rarely
held materials. These networks would include a registry of digitized collections that has information about where the originals are located, who
has responsibility for them, and under what terms they may be used.
Audiovisual• Extend the reach of the National Film Preservation Plan sponsored by the
National Film Preservation Board to continue preserving historically significant films and, in particular, to serve the needs of noncommercial films.
• Implement and extend the reach of the national plan to preserve televisionand video that has been proposed in a study by the Library of Congress.
The U.S. Congress has authorized a similar assessment and plan for recorded sound.
• Encourage scholars and librarians to identify important media collections
in need of preservation and set priorities for treatment.
• Urge scholars and librarians to develop controlled vocabularies and common descriptive standards for the intellectual and inventory control of media collections.

viii

Digital• Develop sound criteria for selecting collections to digitize.
• Develop benchmarks and minimal-level standards for capture and metadata, and document the specifications used.
• Create registries of digitized artifacts to document what has been converted and how, and to facilitate access to the source materials as well as to thesurrogates.
• Develop and use nonproprietary formats for creating born-digital objects
to facilitate the creation of preservable digital files.
• Urge scholars and librarians to develop criteria for selecting born-digitalmaterials to be preserved or managed for long-term access.
• Continue to research and develop methods for preserving digital files.
Task force members were asked to look only at those materials aroundwhich a debate could arise on retention of the original. They recognized thatthe preservation needs of special collections and rare-book collections are also
great and should be addressed in any preservation strategy at both the local
and the national levels.
Good stewardship of the intellectual and cultural assets in libraries andarchives is the responsibility of all members of the research community, notmerely of the librarians and archivists who have immediate custody of thecollections. The preservation challenge cannot be deferred or deflected, forwhat is lost by the present generation cannot be retrieved by the next.

Stephen G. Nichols
Chairman, Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections
Johns Hopkins University
Abby Smith
Director of Programs
Council on Library and Information Resources

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Task Force Members
Stephen G. Nichols, Chairman
James M. Beall Professor of French andHumanities
Chair, Romance Languages
Johns Hopkins University
Francis X. Blouin
Director
Bentley Historical Library
The University of Michigan
Bernard Cerquiglini
Director
Institut national de la langue française
Rebecca S. Chopp
Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
Emory University
Sheldon Hackney
Professor of United States History
University of Pennsylvania
Charles Méla
Université de Genève
James J. O’Donnell
Vice Provost, Information Systems/Computing
University of Pennsylvania
Henry Petroski
A. S. Vesic Professor
Department of Civil Engineering
Duke University

Abby Smith
Director of Programs
Council on Library and Information Resources
Sarah Thomas
University LibrarianCornell University Library
John Unsworth
Director
Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities
University of Virginia
Nancy Vickers
President
Bryn Mawr College
Steven C. WheatleyVice President
American Council of Learned Societies
Karin Wittenborg
University Librarian
University of Virginia
Pauline Yu
Dean of Humanities
College of Letters and Science
University of California at Los Angeles

xReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

1. The ProblemThe “information explosion” sparked by digital technology has
fostered an increasing awareness of the sheer mass of information available today in a variety of media, from traditional
formats such as paper to the more recent film, optical, and magnetic
formats.1 Institutions charged with collecting, storing, preserving,and making accessible recorded information are struggling to keep
pace with the growth of information production, even though theirbrief is to collect only a portion of what is published and an evensmaller portion of what is produced and disseminated in unpublished form. With so much information coming at us, how do we distinguish between what is of long-term value and what is ephemeral?
And of that ephemera, what should be selected to preserve to ensure
for the future a rich record of the present?
Libraries have struggled with these questions for a long time.
Even aggressive collecting will not meet all present and future information needs. In 1875, the Librarian of Congress noted that the quarters the library occupied in the U.S. Capitol were inadequate for theburgeoning collections and, in a thinly veiled appeal to Congress fora new building, described the problems the library had with newspapers and journals.
Though carefully preserved and promptly bound forpreservation, there is no longer the possibility of even receiving
half the issues of these representative journals, so important inour current history and politics; and the time will soon comewhen a legislator in search of a fact, a date, a political article, or atable of statistics known to be in a certain newspaper at a certain

1 One study reports that the world produces a startling 2 billion gigabytes of new

information a year, or roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and childon earth (Lyman and Varian 2000).

1

2The Evidence in Hand

date, will find it only at the bottom of a lofty pile of journals, allof which must be displaced before it can be reached. Besides theissues of the daily press, the periodicals which are taken under
the copyright law or by subscription, embracing most of themonthly and quarterly magazines and reviews, accumulate withsuch rapidity that no device yet invented will long avail toproduce them when wanted. (Cox 2000)

Information is of little long-term use if it is not preserved andmade accessible through indexing or cataloging. At the same time,
much of what has been collected and made accessible by libraries
and archives admittedly receives little or no use. This leads some toargue that investments in preserving so much material that has solittle demonstrated use are a waste of resources. This point of view isnothing new. In the 1890s, around the time when the Library of Congress was moving its collections into a new, purpose-built building,the consolidation of the Lenox and Astor Libraries and Tilden Foundation in New York to create the New York Public Library led to thecollections being closely scrutinized. This move prompted the following letter to the New York Herald from a concerned citizen.
To the Editor of the Herald:
Before the Astor Library moves its quarters, it would do well to
get rid of some scores of thousands of its untouched volumes inorder to make room for readable books. When, after asking in
vain for some work that is the talk of the town, I look up andaround at the rows of shelves packed with “things in books’
clothing.” I find myself echoing the poet’s wish that“. . . From the deadOld Omar would pop forth his head,
And make a bonfire of them all.”Like Charles Lamb, I can read anything that I call a book, butthere is much in the Astor Library which, in my humble opinion,
should be categoried as waste paper.
Clara Marshall
New York, April 6, 1895

Today, little has changed. There is ongoing tension between how
much information is produced and how much can be acquired, preserved, and made accessible in meaningful ways. There is tension
between those who think we should collect as broadly as possible toexpand our research base and those who think too much information
can impede one’s ability to find meaningful information. And there
is always the question of who should be bearing the burden of whatever preservation society deems necessary.
Currently, the Library of Congress has more than 17 million
books and 95 million manuscripts, films, photographs, maps, soundrecordings, and other non-book items. The New York Public LibraryReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

has 42 million items, including more than 14 million books. Despite
these impressive numbers, these libraries hold only a portion of what
is published, or of what is created but not published. The Library ofCongress, for example, which receives items that are registered for
U.S. copyright deposit as well as foreign materials, reports that approximately 31,000 items arrive at its doorstep each working day. Of
these, about 7,000 are selected to become part of its permanent collections (LC 2001). If libraries, archives, or historical societies do not collect instances of recorded information, then the chance of their survival is slim. Loss is inevitable.
Although information overload is not a new problem, the introduction of digital technology onto campuses and into research libraries has fundamentally altered the information landscape and createdproblems for scholars and students that have potentially serious
ramifications. The creation and dissemination of digital resources are
creating new models of service and access, such as licensing rather
than owning essential intellectual assets. The mutability of digital
documents is redefining what constitutes a text. For example, areback issues of a journal that are in digital form simply a bunch of articles or a rich database? Moreover, the conversion of texts into
searchable texts is resulting in increased interdisciplinary research, as
researchers in one field serendipitously find resources that had heretofore been confined (in print) to another field.
Accompanying the trend toward networked information are others that at first seem paradoxical. For example, at the very time that
more material is made available online and retrievable any time,
anywhere, there is increased attention among scholars to original,
unreformatted materials and an increased appreciation for the material aspects of these sources (Tanselle 1998). There are eruptions ofpublic outcry when material losses in libraries and archives are discovered. Scholars demand increasing attention to an ever-expanding
range of candidates for preservation, but library budgets simply cannot support those demands. Preservation has thus become an unfunded mandate, the more pernicious for often being implicit. Academic institutions have learned the huge costs of penny-wisefacilities management and deferred maintenance. It is reasonable tofear that libraries are incurring future costs by deferring preservation.
There is, however, a crucial difference between deferring maintenance costs and deferring expenses for preservation. When we do
not allocate sufficient funds for preservation, we face the probability
that significant resources will be lost forever. Library collections areamong the most valued of a research institution’s intellectual andcultural assets—assets that form a crucial part of what might becalled “public goods.” Unfortunately, with library collections, aswith other public goods, many of those who make claim to their use
are not prepared to take responsibility for their well-being.
This report addresses the value of library collections, especiallythose in physical formats, to scholarship and teaching. It discusses
the costs of the benefits these collections bring and the roles of each3

4

The Evidence in Hand

member of the various communities who have a claim on their use
and a responsibility for their well-being. The report focuses on preservation—what it takes to ensure the present and future usability ofcollections. It is grounded in the recognition that without preservation today, there will be no access tomorrow.
Preservation is a critical part of good stewardship of our intellectual and cultural heritage. Its chief challenges at the turn of the twenty-first century are fourfold:
Quantity. Because of the relentless growth of research libraries
and their collections, an immense number of research items demand
resources to remain accessible. In 1999, the 121 member libraries of
the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) reported owning a totalof 462,965,204 volumes (ARL 2000). The three greatest periods ofgrowth for research libraries occurred after World War I, after WorldWar II, and during the 1990s. A look at 12 representative public university libraries during this period reveals a typical growth pattern.2
In 1907, these libraries held an average of 107,425 volumes. By 1961,
that number had grown to 1,772,831, and by 1995, the average number of volumes per library was 5,334,620 (Molyneux 1998).
Stability of Media. Library collections exist in a variety of physical formats, all of which are vulnerable to some degree. As the rate of
information production has increased, storage media have become
more compact and efficient. However, miniaturization comes at theexpense of stability and longevity. With the exception of preservation-quality microfilm, the new media of the twentieth century are
more fragile than those of the nineteenth, including the infamouswood-pulp paper that has been known to deteriorate into flakes overtime (Conway 1996). The media invented in the last 150 years to capture light and sound are generally extremely fragile, dependent on
machines for playback, and subject to rapid technological obsolescence. For example, the wax cylinders on which are inscribed the earliest known recorded voices of Native Americans are susceptible tomold, heat, scratching, skin oils, and other physical trauma. Moreover, they are dependent on playback equipment for which no replacement parts are manufactured and that few technicians are able
to repair. Nonetheless, the information on them is invaluable andshould be saved for future generations.
Economics. Since 1993, preservation budgets in ARL libraries
have remained flat. The number of staff assigned to preservation is at
a 10-year low (Reed-Scott 1999). At the same time, the demand foraccess to original materials has grown, especially for access to thosematerials in special formats that often are at greatest risk from physical handling or environmental stress. Meanwhile, although the technology for reformatting for access has greatly improved, the funding
for preservation continues to decrease. More money now goes to dig-

2 The libraries are University of California, Berkeley; University of Illinois,

Urbana-Champaign; Indiana University; University of Iowa; University of
Kansas; University of Michigan; University of Minnesota; University of Missouri;
University of Nebraska; Ohio State University; University of Washington, Seattle;
and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

ital reformatting of items to provide access than to microfilming topreserve the low-use brittle books that are rotting on shelves.
Unknown and Unfixed Values of Artifacts. The most difficult
challenge for libraries is deciding how to set priorities for preservation. As long as the claim on preservation resources exceeds theavailable funds, it will be necessary to select which materials will gettreatment and which will not. The choices are made in the context ofchanging perceptions of value and the fluid dynamics of intellectual
inquiry. The recent elevation of nineteenth-century popular imprints
and ephemera to a status of high research value poses an exemplary
challenge. Providing access to those items, which are often at highrisk from embrittlement and routine physical handling, has put greatstrain on library resources. Knowing that the intellectual interests
and research methodologies of scholars will change over time, research institutions have collected “just in case” there is a demand in
the future, rather than “just in time” for current demand. Researchlibraries and archives are full of items that have not been consulted
in decades, if ever, and for which future demand is unpredictable,
yet which make their claim for preservation attention.
How do a library and its home institution make sound fiscal andintellectual decisions about what to preserve, when, for whom, andat what price? Despite the enormous collections of printed materials
that have been amassed, entire categories of primary sources havedisappeared before collecting institutions and their users understoodtheir value. A notorious example of such neglect is the fact that 80
percent of all silent films made in the United States are gone without
a trace. Fifty percent of films made in the nitrate era (that is, before1950) have also perished. Among those extant, a significant portion
are not well preserved. Given that the materials that have vanishedwere not well documented at the time of their creation, the full extent of this loss will never be known.

1.1 The Charge
To seek several perspectives on the importance of the artifact to academic inquiry and teaching and to propose strategies for addressing
the problems just defined, the Council on Library and Information
Resources (CLIR) created the Task Force on the Artifact in Library
Collections in 1999. The task force was charged with answering achallenging question: What will constitute good stewardship of ourintellectual and cultural heritage in the first decades of the twentyfirst century?
Scholars and librarians have common interests in the collectionbuilding process. Although scholars are routinely, and often intimately, engaged with librarians in the acquisitions and use phases ofcollection building, they are usually exposed only to specific aspects
of preservation activities, such as testifying to the value of a collection proposed for preservation microfilming. Rarely do scholars havethe opportunity to view the preservation function as a whole.

56The Evidence in Hand

Recent vigorous debates in the scholarly community and in the
public arena about the value of saving books and newspapers as artifacts, in addition to preserving their content through reformatting
and extending access through digitization, have raised questions
about the involvement of scholars in these decisions. Do scholars
know what happens to original materials after preservation treatment? Do they participate in decision making about the dispositionof original materials after preservation treatment or reformatting?
Are provosts and other academic officers fully informed about theeconomic factors that may constrain a library’s ability to keep its collections fit for use? The task force was asked to engage in a systematic review of the scholarly community’s interests in this and to explore the broader question of how to develop a vision for building
collections in a new information environment comprising both physical and digital materials.
The task force was asked to articulate a framework for making or
evaluating institutional policies for the retention of published materials and archival or unpublished materials in their original form. The
crucial questions associated with this task were as follows:• What qualities of an original are useful or necessary to retain in
their original form? Under what circumstances are original materials required for research?
• When is it sufficient and appropriate to capture intellectual content through reformatting and not necessarily to retain the original?
• Which preservation options provide the most appropriate andcost-effective means of preserving the original?
• From both custodial and scholarly perspectives, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these various preservation options?
Given that resources for preservation are finite and duplicationof efforts can be costly, the task force was also asked to consider theadvisability and feasibility of creating one or more national repositories into which one or more copies of all materials published in the
United States would be deposited and permanently retained.
The task force was asked to interpret its charge broadly. It was
asked to give primary consideration to print formats but also to consider the burgeoning numbers of non-print and electronic researchsources that increasingly demand attention from preservation specialists. In fact, shortly after the task force convened, its members
identified the problems facing non-print materials as being as important, certainly larger in scope, and probably more urgent than thosefacing print materials. The task force therefore gave almost equalconsideration to three types of collection materials: print, analog audiovisual, and digital. Although technical constraints and considerations of preservation actions cannot be ignored, members were
urged to focus on their implications for the research process, rather
than on the technologies themselves. Preservation and access aretechnology-dependent, and best practices for ensuring long-term access to information will change over time.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

1.2 The Work of the Task Force
In taking up its charge, the task force confirmed that the pressure on
research libraries to keep up with the past while preparing for the
future is of vital interest to scholars, governing boards, academic officers, and funders, as well as to librarians and archivists. Members
agreed on several premises that would guide the task force’s work.
Although these premises can be simply stated, each speaks to the uncertainty and dynamism that characterize the environment in which
research libraries operate. The premises are as follows:• Information technology will continue to change rapidly.
• Best practices for preservation and access will change.
• Digital resources will increase significantly.
• Scholarly research trends will change; in anticipation of suchchanges, scholars will continue to demand that collections be as
inclusive as possible.
• Intellectual property-rights management will evolve and must be
respected.
• Financial and human resources will not keep pace with demand.
• Financial and human resources should be allocated in the mostcost-effective manner to achieve an acceptable trade-off between
quality of resource and expenditure of time and money.
Task force members began with a survey of current library practices in preservation and in collection development. They gathered
information about what research libraries do and do not collect, howlibraries will ensure access to those collections over time, and how
they set priorities for investments in their collections, especially forpreservation. (These findings are summarized in Appendix I.) Task
force members then identified the particular needs of library materials in three areas: print, analog audiovisual, and digital. They determined that the ways in which these media are collected and preserved—and even which institutions do or do not engage in certain
activities—are distinct issues that warrant separate consideration (seeSection 3, States of the Artifact, 1800–2000). Throughout their inquiry,task force members returned to the simple but almost overwhelming
fact that the web of resources that are useful for scholarship continues to grow at a rapid pace. More information is being produced anddisseminated than before, and ever-widening orbits of intellectual
inquiry call for ready access to these materials. While many of thesesources, from business records to digital art, fall outside the traditional purview of library collecting, they are part of the larger information environment that influence public expectations of what libraries
can and should be doing.
The task force relied on the testimony of experts from the library
and archival fields for information ranging from the technical to thefinancial to the theoretical. On the basis of these findings and in consideration of the economic realities of funding preservation and access, the task force proposed definitions of responsible stewardshipof research and cultural materials, and articulated the roles that eachparty in the research community and beyond plays in that stewardship (see Section 5, Summary and Recommendations).

7

The Evidence in Hand

8

2. The Artifact In QuestionT

he word “artifact” can be confusing because it masks a number of unexamined assumptions. In academic parlance, “artifact” can refer to a physical object, a primary record, or aphysical object that constitutes a primary record.3 For the purposesof this report, an artifact will be defined as an information resourcein which the information is recorded on a physical medium, such asa photograph or a book, and in which the information value of theresource adheres not only in the text or content but also in the object
itself. In other words, artifacts are things that have intrinsic value asobjects, independent of their informational content.
In recent years, scholars have identified an increasing number oflibrary items that have research value as physical objects, above andbeyond the information recorded in them. The Modern Language
Association (MLA) has been concerned that the technologies of reproduction, such as photocopying, microfilming, and digital scanning, are becoming so good, so readily available, and so serviceable
for many research and teaching purposes, that the importance of theunderlying original might be devalued. To call attention to the dangers inherent in ignoring the fate of physical collections, the association created a committee to consider the issue. This group defined an
artifact or primary record as “a physical object produced or used at
the particular past time that one is concerned with in a given instance” (MLA 1996). Members asserted that for practical purposes,
all historical publications, even those produced by mass-production
techniques designed to minimize deviations from a norm, haveunique physical qualities that may have value as a carrier of (physical) evidence in a given research project.4 Although careful to note it
3 In scientific laboratories, “artifact” also denotes a phenomenon or substancethat is a by-product of some external action or agent.
4 The statement addresses only text-based sources. If this standard of value wereextended to visual and sound resources, the universe of primary records wouldgrow exponentially.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

is not possible to save all copies of printed materials from destruction and the ravages of time, the committee’s statement nonethelessprovoked some anxiety among librarians. This is because, while asserting the importance of preserving as many artifacts as possible
and acknowledging the need to set priorities for preservation, thestatement gave no guidance about how to make such priorities.
Nicholson Baker recently alleged that libraries’ poor stewardship ofbooks and serials has resulted in the loss of many resources of artifactual value. He further asserted that it is the responsibility of libraries in general and of certain large libraries in particular to collectmasses of primary source materials and preserve them in their artifactual form. Yet he, too, failed to address the crucial matters of who
would bear the responsibility for setting priorities, who would assume the custodial burden of these comprehensive collections, and
who would fund these activities (Baker 2001).
An increasing number of library collections are being promoted,
as it were, to resources of artifactual, not just informational, value.
Given the nature of contemporary scholarship and its wide-ranging
interest in material and popular culture, this trend makes perfectsense. Regrettably, libraries have never had sufficient funds to collectand preserve everything of potential research value. Thus, for libraries, this expansive view of artifactual value presents problems thatare not primarily theoretical, but eminently practical.
Given the task of identifying achievable, fundable preservation
strategies and goals for libraries, the task force took seriously its
charge to identify parameters of artifactual value and to do so in a
way that, following the spirit of preservation principles, would accept some loss as inevitable. It sought, in other words, to manage therisks of unacceptable loss. By looking well beyond the traditional
mainstay of research library holdings—books and serials—and seeing that in the not-too-distant future the demand for analog audiovisual sources and for digital materials of all types will be as great as
or greater than is the demand for print resources, the task force had
to grapple with the prospect that the present preservation problem
will grow to a scale that will render current approaches to preservation and access obsolete or irrelevant.

2.1 Selection for Preservation of the Original
The library preservation community has agreed on certain cardinalfeatures of physical objects that warrant preservation in their originalformats. These features are• age• evidential value• aesthetic value• scarcity• associational value• market value• exhibition value

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The Evidence in Hand

Objective criteria or established practice determine many ofthese features, and the criteria vary little among libraries. They are,in short, best practice. Several selection policies that are based largelyon these features appear as examples in Appendix III.
The task force excluded from consideration those categories ofartifacts that are always retained in the original. Such artifacts include, for example: books printed before 1801, which are usually segregated from general holdings in a rare-book collection and subject
to different handling and preservation protocols; manuscripts andarchival materials that exist only in few or single copies; and itemswith high market value. These items are often crucially important for
research and teaching; at the same time, there is little debate about
their value as physical objects. Moreover, their disposition after reformatting is not an issue. Despite their importance to research collections and their rightful demand on preservation resources, thesetypes of artifacts are not discussed in detail in this report because
their value is not seriously contested in the libraries that have responsibility for them.
The value of the artifact for research purposes—as opposed to its
monetary value or exhibition value—is chiefly evidentiary. An artifact is of evidential value because it testifies to the extent the information in it is original, faithful, fixed, or stable.
Originality. An original manifestation of a book, photograph, orrecorded performance is valuable because through it a scholar may
come closer to uncovering the original intent of the creator or the
publisher or both.5 When a copy yields insufficient information
about that intent, access to the original may be needed. Reformatting
and copying information are analogous to translation from one language to another. Depending on the source and the target language,
as well as the skill, care, and cultural biases of the translator, something inalienable to the original is always lost. A good translation,
like good recopying, is one that loses the least amount of originalcontent and intent.
Fidelity. The physical artifact is useful, and at times essential, inestablishing the authenticity of an item. In other words, it has forensic value. How does one know that the item in one’s hands is what it
purports to be? There are internal clues in a document that give evidence of authenticity. Among these are the accuracy and appropriateness of the content. A newspaper dated 1901 that contains listingsof television broadcasts, for example, is unlikely to be authentic. In
addition, the external information contained in a physical manifestation provides clues of authenticity and integrity. Erasure marks on asheet of paper, splices in a film, dried white erasure fluid on property
maps—all these are physical clues to the integrity of the object and,hence, the authenticity of the information recorded in it.
Fixity. The content of the artifact when it was first produced constitutes the text (in the case of textual materials) or the document (in5 The instances of published versions differing from the presumed intent of thecreator are legion in books, films, and other materials. In those cases, the sourcesthat contain information about the work in prepublication form (e.g., drafts,
outtakes, and proof sheets) are also required to reconstruct original intent.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

the case of a photograph or an opera performance). If one is holdinga fifteenth-generation fax, one cannot guarantee that the full content
of the original is conveyed except by comparing it with the original,
which has fixed the content by recording it at one instant in time.
One of the wonders of mass reproduction of text is the way in which
replication by machine en masse tended to stabilize texts that had
previously been somewhat fluid. Recent humanities scholarship,
however, has done much to undermine the notion of even massprintings producing a stable version or versions of various texts, andthe digital realm is eroding further the concept of the fixed content ofa published item.
Stability. The persistence of an object over time leads to the stable and continuous accessibility of the information contained in it.
Documents whose physical substrate changes over time themselveschange. Film that gets spliced and repaired loses content; digital files
that get reformatted into a newer version of a software programchange; photographic images printed or displayed in various manners shift tone. When one looks at a 30-year-old image of a woman ina red coat that has been printed on paper that fades and at a contemporary image made from the same negative that has been made intoa slide and is being projected on a screen, chances are that the coatwill appear as a different shade of red in each image. The content orvalue of that red is not stable, and it is difficult to efface mentally theeffects of age and reformatting and to determine whether the originalcolor of the coat was scarlet or crimson.
Some artifacts are valuable for research because the format itself
is the subject of investigation. Original bindings carry evidence ofprint history, just as original daguerreotypes carry evidence of anearly imaging technology. Bindings can also testify to the economic
status of the intended reader (inexpensive as opposed to expensive
presentations, for example). In these cases, the object itself is the primary source of interest.
Also of value to the research process is the physical encounter
between the researcher and the object—an encounter that can help
prime the scholar’s imaginative and analytical skills. While this factor is highly subjective and difficult to quantify, many scholars claim
it has had, at least at some stage of their careers, an irreplaceable
heuristic value. A medievalist who has never worked directly frommanuscripts is at a disadvantage, just as a biographer of Thomas Jefferson who has worked exclusively from the printed editions of his
letters may be said to work at one critical remove from his or her
subject. Nevertheless, given the toll that physical handling takes on
all types of materials, the task force considered that surrogates can be
judiciously used by those who have a familiarity with original source
materials and that, from the perspectives of preservation and convenience of access, surrogates are often preferable.6
6 See, for example, the case of the international editorial team working on theJames Boswell Papers at the Beinecke Library (Bouché 1999). The editors came toprefer using digital scans of the original manuscripts to working from theoriginals in New Haven. In part this was a matter of convenience—the work
could be done wherever the editors were located and obviated the need for
repeated trips to New Haven; however, the editors also recognized that the scans
were more legible than were the originals.

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The Evidence in Hand

2.2 Frameworks for Determining Value
Questions about the nature of the artifact have caused scholars andlibrary professionals to realize that, even for the early part of thenineteenth century, much more information of potential research value exists in traditional formats such as paper and image than had
previously been recognized. Consequently, the process of redefining
what constitutes an artifact must be done not only for new media but
also for a considerable body of information from the 1800s. The fragility of paper-based materials printed since 1850, especially newspapers, has been a concern for some time (Baker 2000, Cox 2000, Marley 1975, Smith 1995). Because newsprint is so fragile, preserving one
or more instances of all imprints of newspapers poses enormous
technical as well as financial challenges. More recently, there has
been a growing awareness of other kinds of artifacts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that also require the attention ofpreservationists. These include materials that serve as primary evidence of popular culture, ranging from baseball cards to ladies’ magazines to dime novels to political posters. All were produced for amass market using cheap and readily available materials.
The examples from popular culture raised the most difficult matter the task force considered: How to weigh the relative merits ofvarious claims on scarce preservation resources. The need to consider merit is nothing new. Scholars, archivists, and librarians have always assumed a hierarchy in collections. The artifact or original document was the item initially collected and accessioned. When it was
prized for some unique aspect of its material or historical existence(e.g., a first edition, a holograph manuscript, a signed author’s copy,
or a presentation copy of a work), the artifact was given priority forpreservation. Absent that uniqueness, a lower level of care might begiven, and a lost or damaged copy might be replaced by one whose
physical manifestations were quite different (e.g., a photocopy or a
reprint). The value of the unique artifact could be defined variously
as “historically important,” “rare,” “associational,” and so on. In
each instance, however, there was an individual material object thatsomeone had once defined as valuable enough to retain.
The Achilles’ heel of traditional definitions of the artifact lay inthe value judgment that determined artifactual status in the first instance. What were the grounds for deciding in favor of one object
and against another? How can libraries cope with the fact that thevalue of the artifact is never quite the same to different researchers?
While one scholar will seek certain information from the item, scholars from other disciplines will require different kinds of data that
may involve a wholly different way of handling the object.7 Can one
say that these users are even seeing the same object?8
7 Research disciplines train scholars to attend to the materiality of their objects ofstudy in very different ways. Historians, literary scholars, philosophers, art
historians, historians of science, linguists, and text editors examine quite different
aspects of an object of study, which, in the case of artifactual objects, will becomplex. Sometimes there may be overlap, but more often there is not. The needsof all serious users are legitimate, and preservation should serve them as
effectively and equitably as possible.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

Scholars and others who use artifacts may think of them in theaggregate as unified objects; however, when they interrogate the artifact for their research, they tend to focus on parts rather than thewhole. One may define the artifact as a series of multiple discrete
components—handwriting, watermarks, marginalia, splices, evidence of use—each potentially a focal point for scholars and others,
depending on what they are studying. From the standpoint of usage,
people normally analyze discrete sets of information contained within an artifact. The fact that artifacts are complex and that they lendthemselves to a variety of intellectual endeavors means that one
must think of them in terms of their parts, and not just as wholes.
One way to think of the artifact, then, would be as a multiplicity of
informational sets, including the material form of the object and its
contextual history, where known. (The relationship of part to wholeis also crucially important.)
One element of the artifact’s complexity is the fact that scholars
from different fields will perceive and use it in different ways. A firstedition of a novel by Charles Dickens will be used very differently bya historian of Victorian England researching the economics of thebook trade, a literary scholar concerned with different versions of thework, an art historian interested in Victorian book illustration, a textual historian interested in layout, and a historian of bookmaking.
Each will consult the same artifact for a different kind of information,and none may notice the information sought by the others. Similarly,
photographs of the Civil War by Alexander Gardner can be used to
study the battles; the public’s reception of the war in the North; thehistory of clothing, medicine, or gender; or even the medium of photography. Which subject interest and methodology would require
use of the original? Which could make do with copy prints? Whichcould make use only of the original photographs in their original
presentation portfolios? Which would be enhanced by access to theimages through digital delivery, which could then be manipulated tomagnify details?
The preceding observations suggest the possibility of proposing
a contextual definition of the artifact as follows:
An artifact is a physical object produced at some time in the past,
and attesting to a given set of practices, thinking, and ways ofviewing the world, and whose importance will be defined bypresent and future needs and use. The value of the artifact isstrongly influenced, but not completely determined, by its rare or
unique features.

The artifact conveys historical consciousness in different ways,
depending on who studies it and for what purpose. Much of the information conveyed by an artifact does not require the presence of
8 Artifacts derive their value from how they are viewed and used in a given

culture at a particular moment. As cultural variables, they will be viewed andstudied differently in different periods. A holograph copy of a speech by
Robespierre would have a different value for a royalist in Louis XVIII’s
government in 1816 than for a socialist historian in France in the 1990s.

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The Evidence in Hand

the physical object. Surrogates of the object (e.g., photographs, photocopies, and digital versions) may convey much of the information
stored by the artifact. Indeed, for many purposes, a high-quality surrogate may convey this information better than does the original.
The surrogate may enable access and use that would otherwise be
impossible; for example, it allows a user to view an object that is
physically distant, to enhance images, or to perform full-text searches. Surrogates do not obviate some scholars’ need to consult the object itself; however, in many instances, a surrogate can serve scholarly needs as well as, or better than, does the artifact itself.
The artifact matters. It matters very much. Nevertheless, in atime when artifacts are abundant and resources scarce, the scholarly
and library communities are called to rethink the status of the artifact
in terms of its content and material form. Acknowledging that every
aspect of an artifact yields information that will be of use to somescholar or other, we nonetheless need to assess the relative importance of the different aspects of an artifact pragmatically. Scholars
and library professionals jointly face issues such as the following.
First, within the timeframe of the last 200 years, what constitutes
an artifact worth retaining? The answer is not obvious in the case ofnineteenth-century material artifacts: baseball manuals or railway
timetables have not traditionally been viewed as important cultural
documents, although they probably would be today. The question
becomes truly perplexing in the case of media that are dependent on
playback equipment, from recorded sound to moving images, inwhich the concepts of original or unique, stable or fixed, may noteven apply.
A second question concerns resources and priorities. This imperative may be spelled out as the “how, who, and when” of artifact
preservation. In other words, accepting the reality that resources forpreservation are limited, and assuming some common, gross-level
understanding of the value of artifacts, how (in what form) are they
to be preserved, by whom, and when (or how often)? Are all libraries
or archives to be held responsible for collecting and preserving thesame categories of artifacts? How much redundancy of preservationis necessary? How much can libraries afford? Redundant collections
serve as insurance policies for preserving and making accessible information in a physical format. This is even true for digital information, which can be cloned and shipped around the globe almost instantaneously, yet is highly fragile if no one assumes archiving
responsibility for the data. In the case of digital information, given
the high costs of building and maintaining information technologicalinfrastructures, the same degrees of redundancy that we see for print
may be neither desirable nor feasible. If and when digital files become the default mode for access—even for materials such as journal
articles or encyclopedias, which were originally physical artifacts—
what are the implications for duplicative collections of physical artifacts?
The point is not to determine whether baseball manuals and railway timetables from the nineteenth century, for example, are of suffi-Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

cient artifactual value to justify the expense of collecting and preserving them. Rather, it is to set priorities in the face of financial constraints that too often mean, practically speaking, that if one decides
to collect and preserve one kind of artifact, resources for other kinds
will be insufficient.
The issue is not to evaluate the artifact per se to determine whatsurvives and what does not. The scholarly community has no moreof a claim to the wisdom of the ages than does the library community. The issue is to identify productive methods for interrogating theindividual artifact that would, in a climate of finite resources, inform
decisions about whether and how to preserve it. Such methods
would help ensure survival of the greatest number of artifacts by intelligent analysis and careful consideration among knowledgeable
and committed communities.
There is no single method of engaging primary sources, nor isthere one overriding set of priorities—text over image, manuscript
over map, English language over non-English—that will meet theneeds of present or future research. But how do scholars, librarians,
and archivists work together to prevent the kinds of losses that we
can now regret in leisure—local newspapers, silent films, early television broadcasts, among others? Some past initiatives have brought
together the scholarly, archival, and libraries communities to propose
preservation and collection guidelines. The Commission on Preservation and Access convened scholars in the 1980s to identify brittle
books to microfilm (George 1995). In the 1990s, the American Historical Association, the ARL, and the MLA created a task force on thepreservation of the artifact to document preservation challenges andinform scholars about the need to collaborate with libraries to address them (Reed-Scott 1999). These efforts have effectively addressed specific problems. However, most of the collaborations between scholars and librarians have been either locally based ordesigned to address only specific areas of concern, and they have focused largely on print materials. One goal of the task force was topropose strategies for collaboration that are realistic and sustainable,that balance the needs of present and future users, and that address
the proliferation of nonprint materials in the information landscape.
American scholarship has historically relied on a decentralized
network of libraries, archives, historical societies, and museums tocollect, preserve, and make accessible the intellectual and cultural
resources that form the basis of academic inquiry. This decentralized
and largely uncoordinated approach is unlikely to change, despite
the resulting losses of artifacts that have occurred. However, newpreservation and information technologies promise to offer cost-effective means to prevent or slow physical deterioration and to keep
the research community well informed about what others in thecommunity are doing to preserve their holdings. These technologies
will be successful to the extent that the research community is committed to identifying preservation challenges and to lobbying for financial resources—from provosts and foundations to federal agencies—to address them. Strategies for collaboration will depend on

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The Evidence in Hand

the use of new information technologies to share crucial information
about the status of various collections. They will also depend on thecontinued engagement of scholars, librarians, and archivists to deploy those technologies in meeting their responsibilities to the wellbeing of the intellectual and cultural assets whose benefits they enjoy.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

3. States of the Artifact
1800–2000

3.1 The Changing Features of the ArtifactResearch library collections are primarily made up of printed
matter: books, serials, journals, and newspapers. Even withthe rapid growth of machine-readable and electronic resources, 85 to 90 percent of the acquisitions budgets of libraries stillgoes toward the purchase of printed matter.9 Humanities and social
science scholars rely heavily on print journals for scholarly communication and so do scientists. Those who work within the print regime rely on a series of conventions about documents and their relationship to their physical manifestation that may be so familiar thatthey are invisible. These conventions bear mentioning, however, because many of them do not operate in realms of audiovisual and digital resources.
Among the many consequences of the adoption of printing technology, several became fixtures in the print landscape. They are• the creation of a comparatively fixed and stable text
• the concept of authorship and of intellectual property inhering inauthorship• easy duplication and wide dissemination of texts, especially after
the introduction of high-volume presses in the nineteenth century• the notion of fungibility of informational content (also a result of
mass-market publishing)
While texts copied by hand were intended to replicate theirsources, they did not do so precisely or completely. With the adventof printing, it became possible to produce nearly identical copies inlarge numbers. This great increase in the accuracy of reproduction
was crucial in the development of scientific and technical literature,
9 In 1998-1999, both ARL and Digital Library Federation member libraries spent

about 10 percent of their resources budgets on electronic resources (Jewell 2001, 4).

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The Evidence in Hand

and especially so in the reproduction of illustrations. While there certainly have been variations between printings, and even among copies from the same press run, the presumption that authorship andcontent were, in principle, stable and fixed, took hold, with significant consequences. The notion of repeatability and accurate reproduction, on the one hand, and of a reliable text with a known author,
on the other, caused a shift that Foucault describes in detail in “WhatIs an Author?” According to Foucault, with the arrival of printing,scientific literature ceased to derive its claim to legitimacy from its
attribution to an author (Aristotle, for example) and began to derive
its authority from principles of experimentation—the potential falsifiability of the hypothesis, the repeatability of the experiment, thereplicability of the result. Literature, on the other hand, began to derive its authority not from its dispersion and repetition in the culture,
but from its originality and its connection with a particular author(Foucault 1977). In an information economy, much now depends onthese notions of fixity, reproducibility, and authorship, as many recent court cases, legislative acts, and international agreements attest.
Bibliographic and textual scholarship, since the nineteenth century, has shown just how precarious and nuanced these concepts are.
The destabilization of our ideas of fixed content began to accelerate,
however, with the advent of audiovisual recording technologies. Daguerreotypes exist in only one version, because the image is exposed
directly onto a metallic plate; wax cylinder recordings are also
unique, each produced as a live recording. (Although they were produced in batches, there was no master.) Film-based images, however,
do have a master—the photographic negative. For this reason, theycan exist in multiple, nearly identical copies. Still, although the images are all made from one source (i.e., a negative), the negative inevitably wears with use, and the copies become less faithful. Throughreproduction, the image on the negative can be effaced. This is not astrue of print products. Engravings do deteriorate with each production, and books set with type can show wear from copy to copy; nevertheless, the loss of information for texts from copy to copy is generally not as striking as it is for visual and sound resources.
In non-print materials, the problem of “version control”—i.e.,
determining which version should be preserved as an original—iscomplicated by a further lack of stability over time and place. Thisfactor characterizes broadcast media in particular. Take as an example a single television document that a news archives might wish tocollect: the CNN news broadcast for January 15, 1998. What do thearchives collect? The broadcast that originated in Atlanta, in London,
or in Tokyo? This problem has existed among collectors of newspapers, of course, with libraries deciding often on the final edition as
being the one of record and making efforts to collect several editionsof a paper that tracks a particularly important event, such as an assassination or an election. But the scale of this problem for broadcast
media on a 24-hour news cycle that constantly update news is of adifferent order.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

The artifact that records an image or sound, moreover, can easilylose its originality or uniqueness. The adjective “unique” may haveonce been sufficient to identify a primary document in manuscript,
and in some cases, such as legal documents or signed first editions, it
may still have some meaning. But with newer formats, such as electronic and broadcast media that rely on refreshing and reformatting
for longevity, the terms “original,” “unique,” “content fixity,” and“material artifact” mean little.
Task force members found the cardinal features of an artifact thathave the highest research value—originality, faithfulness, fixity, andstability—retreating like a mirage as they worked their way from the
1800s into the twenty-first century. The three sections that follow
look at how these four values work themselves out in print, analog
audiovisual, and digital documents. These sections also explore how
preservation strategies address these values and seek to preservethem. Preservation options, it will be seen, are shaped by such factors as the quantity and quality of resources, the instability of media,
constraints of resource allocation, and the changing valuation of theartifact in research and teaching.

3.2 Print/Paper
3.2.1 The Relative Stability of Imprints

Books and other printed matter deteriorate over time as the result of
their inherent chemical instability. For example, when paper made ofwood pulp reacts with humidity and heat, it becomes brittle. Books
also deteriorate as a result of mechanical strain. For example, thespine is stressed when an open book is placed on a photocopy machine. (Photocopying also exposes the paper to heat and light.) But
there have been significant changes in how books, journals, andnewspapers have been made since 1800, and these changes affecttheir significance as artifacts as well as their physical robustness.
In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, much attention was focused on
the legacy of brittle books created by the processes for making inexpensive paper. Now joined to this concern about the paper is concern
about the structural support for that text block—the binding. The lastfew decades have seen an explosion of relatively inexpensive, softcover editions of books that were not designed to last. Thus, the task
force looked at both chemical and mechanical problems associatedwith paper and its binding.
Paper. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, paper was
made from linen and cotton rags, which in principle make a strong
and durable product.10 In the 1850s, wood pulp came into generalusage for making paper more economically. The publishing industry
rapidly converted to this process, following the lead of the newspapers, for which wood pulp was a source of inexpensive newsprint.

10 Acid was sometimes used even in the production of rag paper. The firstproblems with acid paper appeared in the 1830s, when rag paper was bleachedwith acid-producing chemicals that weakened it.

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The manufacturing process required that wood-pulp paper be treated with aluminum sulfate (alum) to keep the inks from running andto improve the hand. Alum, together with various bleaches and sizings usually added during the papermaking process, reacts with humidity to produce an acid that, over time, breaks down the molecular structure of the cellulose in the wood pulp. In its worst form,
damage leads to “brittle” paper that loses its flexibility and eventually crumbles when handled. While any given page may be readable,
turning it may lead to several types of damage. In thin, hard-finish
paper, the page becomes brittle and brown along the edges and caneasily snap off along a fold line. Thick, pulpy paper tends to separate
almost spontaneously under tensile stress in any direction, andwhole blocks of text may come loose near the gutter and fall out ofthe volume (Kantor 1986).
Once paper becomes embrittled, nothing can arrest the decay.
Such materials are candidates for preservation reformatting, that is,capturing the information content of the original and transferring it
onto a stable medium such as preservation-quality microfilm.11
While acid paper of any sort is at risk, decay manifests itself unevenly. Manufacturing processes vary a great deal, and the conditions of storage and use can vary dramatically as well. Few places
have proved to be as bad for wood-pulp paper as the humid, polluted eastern seaboard of the United States. Books, like people, prefer
California-like climates that are temperate and do not vary dramatically.
Many acid-paper items are not yet embrittled and can be stabilized to arrest the process of embrittlement. The two chief methodsof stabilizing acid-based paper are deacidification and storage under
optimal conditions. Deacidification is a chemical process whereby
paper is treated with an alkaline buffering agent that neutralizes theacid content. It can be done on a single item or on many items at atime. There are facilities that can deacidify bound materials en
masse, and some facilities can even treat unbound materials, such as
sheet music, archival documents, and newspapers. Deacidification
can stop further damage, but it neither reverses damage done nor
strengthens already-brittle paper. Therefore, it is unsuitable for books
that are damaged or weak. Part of the cost of treatment lies in carefully assessing, item by item, how suitable a book is for deacidification.12
Embrittlement can also be avoided or slowed by storing materials in stable environments with set parameters for temperature andhumidity. These storage conditions cannot be obtained in open-access stacks. The conditions that slow the decay of library materials
11 Not all microfilm is created equal, and the preservation profession recognizes

certain standards of film capture, film quality, and storage as being preservationworthy. Unfortunately, a significant number of microfilms do not meet thesestandards, resulting in surrogates of poor quality.
12 A relatively new technology, known as paper splitting, strengthens weakened

paper by splitting a piece of paper in half to separate the front from the back,inserting a stabilizing layer, and reapplying the two halves of the paper. This
process, which was developed in Germany, is not widely deployed in the UnitedStates.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

would be uninhabitable for most people. One of the reasons that libraries have been eager to build remote storage facilities is to lengthen the productive lives of their print collections.
How extensive is the problem of brittle books? In 1984, the Library of Congress and Yale University surveyed their holdings andfound that one-quarter to one-third of their collections were highly
embrittled and in danger of imminent disintegration. This alarmed
other libraries, which turned to their partners in the academic community to help assess their collections and devise a coordinatedstrategy to address the problem of brittle books. The Council on Library Resources asked the Association of American Universities andthe American Council of Learned Societies to join in creating a task
force to study the extent of book deterioration. In 1984, RobertHayes, then dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information
Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, was commissioned to determine the percentage of embrittlement at major repositories in the United States. He determined that of the 305 million volumes in Association of Research Libraries collections, approximately
25 percent were brittle. Hayes also attempted to determine the degree of overlap among libraries to find out how many of these wereindividual titles that needed to be preserved. The number he arrived
at was 12 million, and he estimated that about one-third of these
could be microfilmed in a 20-year period (Hayes 1985).
The reformatting of brittle books accomplished two things: it rescued information deemed endangered and increased access to that
information—a point that was critical in persuading the U.S. Congress to fund the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
Brittle Books Program. Each reel of preservation microfilm produced
under the auspices of NEH was made available for purchase, in accordance with any copyright considerations, and each title filmed
was entered into a database that recorded the existence of the film.
This strategy not only helped avoid accidental duplication of effort
but also made known the availability of the titles.
Although important for meeting the needs of remote users, microfilming books seldom best serves the access needs of local users.
Photocopying onto acid-free paper is the preferred technique for thispurpose, and it is an option used increasingly by most libraries.13
But what does shared access to the artifact look like? How can asingle book serve the needs of both local and remote users? The example of registering reformatted books raises a question for thoseengaged in mass-deacidification programs. Does each library have to
duplicate the deacidification work of the others? Would it be possible
to create national registries where libraries log the books that they
have treated? Other libraries could then consult the log and determine whether local demand dictated treating their copy of the work,or whether it would be acceptable to box or shrink-wrap the workand send it to remote storage, knowing that if that copy became too
13 Johns Hopkins University is doing more preservation photocopying and lessmicrofilming, and this trend is common among ARL libraries. (Testimony ofJames Neal to the task force, October 29, 1999.)

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The Evidence in Hand

brittle to use, library patrons would have access to another copy
through interlibrary loan. Unlike reformatting on film or digital files,
saving one book in its original form does not increase access to it.
The problem is, how can libraries achieve economies of scale in thepreservation of artifacts? The first step would be to improve passive
systems, especially environmental conditions. If libraries do not intervene to save every low-use book that will turn brittle, but take action (such as deacidification) to stabilize some number of them thatcan fulfill the needs of patrons who must use an original, how manyof a single item should be preserved, where, and at whose expense?
Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library has microfilmed
more than 60,000 books during the last 12 years. During that time,
though, the library acquired 150,000 additional books each year, andmore than 65 percent of these came from countries where permanent,or alkaline-buffered, paper is not used. In other words, almost
100,000 volumes being added to the library’s collection each year are
at risk of becoming brittle in the future. On the basis of its own estimates, Yale determined that filming a volume after it became brittle
would cost about $120 in current dollars. Scanning the volume might
cost as little as $80, but the cost of preserving and managing digital
files over time is unknown, and, in any event, it is not yet a preservation format. Deacidification would cost $17 a volume. This is one library’s estimate of how cheap an ounce of prevention would be incomparison with a pound of cure (Walls 2000). This is in line with
the LC’s estimates of the various treatments available for print materials (see Appendix VI).
With respect to the future, the good news is that publishers in
the industrialized world had largely ceased to use acid paper by the
1990s, at least for first printings. In 1990, the U.S. government mandated the use of permanent, acid-free paper in all documents andpublications that were to be archived, and most state governments
have followed suit. Most publishers agreed to print the first press
runs of hardcover books on permanent paper.
Librarians have noted a disturbing trend during routine checking of new acquisitions for acidity. In many newly independent andemerging countries—countries from which U.S. libraries get a significant portion of their collections—printers continue to use unbuffered wood-pulp paper. A large portion of these acquisitions are athigh risk for acidity. But more and more academic and trade presses
in the developed countries are producing reprints—and an ever-increasing number of first press runs in paperback—on acid paper.
Consequently, many new acquisitions, not only from Asia or SouthAmerica but also from Europe and North America, may be at risk ofembrittlement unless deacidification or other preventive measures
are undertaken.
Binding. In the West, changes in the publishing economy havecreated yet more preservation problems. To save money and cater tomass markets, publishers have sharply increased the numbers of paperback books published. As a result of this trend, which began in
the 1950s, libraries need to rebind these acquisitions even before put-Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

ting them on the shelves. This may divert money that would otherwise be spent for preserving older items.
Books and other bound materials are vulnerable not only because the paper may be weak but also because physical handling
weakens the structure of the volume and creates other problems. A
study done in 1994 at New York University yielded some interesting
data. During one week, preservation experts looked at everythingthat came across the circulation desk. They found that 21 percent ofcirculating books returned with spine damage and 14 percent neededrebinding or recasing. Thirty-two percent of the books returned were
stained or damaged in some way.14
The latest ARL preservation statistics (1996–1997) reflect the local
need to keep books as objects alive and well. ARL libraries repaired
12 times as many books as they filmed (873,000 versus 70,597) duringthat period. Thirty-six percent of total preservation expenses went
for contract binding; filming accounted for only 3.6 percent. Of the 2
to 4 percent of library budgets that go to preservation (exclusive ofcapital costs), item-level repair appears to be the asset-management
strategy of choice.
3.2.2 Evaluation of the Artifact and Selection for Preservation

The recent interest in the production of knowledge has made materials that libraries acquired as secondary sources in the last two centuries into primary sources for this century. The lively field of printing
history has made the book itself, rather than its content, the subjectof investigation. This has promoted a large and not very physicallyrobust category of resources to artifact status.
It is not surprising that historians of print are interested in books
that were created before the mechanization of printing and binding.
Book production before the 1830s was craft work. Printers delivered
unbound sheets to the booksellers, who then bound them into volumes that carried the printers’ own imprints. One printing was distributed among a number of booksellers, each of which would bindthe volumes differently. Consequently, the same printing could appear as a number of forms. Each set can be considered unique in its
printing, binding, or dissemination and thus worthy of retention in acollection.
The introduction of mass production has not diminished the status of books from the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century as
items with artifactual interest. There were so many innovations in
the business and art of printing during that period that there are now
many candidates for special treatment as objects, irrespective of thecontent. While books printed before 1801 are usually managed as“rare” books, there is an increasing use of the category of “mediumrare” books of the nineteenth century that are served to patrons un14 Testimony of Carol Mandel to the task force, October 29, 1999. A similar studyof circulating collections at several Columbia University libraries in 1995
revealed significantly higher levels of embrittlement and other damage in theoldest collections. More funds were subsequently allocated for rebinding andprotective enclosures. (Personal communication, Janet Gertz to Abby Smith,April 4, 2001.)

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The Evidence in Hand

der somewhat stricter protocols than are general collection imprints.
This could be because the books have illustrations that are of research value or are vulnerable to mutilation; have aesthetically significant bindings; or were produced by special printers or publishinghouses. These books rarely receive the intensive, item-level treatmentthat a rare book would get; a global or collection-level treatment issufficient to ensure that they survive in usable form. This is one example of preventive preservation that should be encouraged in libraries holding important collections of such materials.
One should not underestimate the amount of time it takes to select books for this kind of treatment. (Books are rarely shelved byage, after all.) Some libraries pull these books during normal shelfinventorying or when they cross the circulation desk. Other libraries
pull these books when they are selecting items for filming, scanning,deacidification, or secondary storage. To expect each library to develop a collection of artifacts relevant to the history of printing simply
because it has books from eras relevant to that field, however, is neither feasible nor responsible.
Many paper-based collections other than books and periodical
publications held in special collections libraries and departments arealso at risk. Libraries, archives, historical societies, and museums
house large collections of pamphlets, letters, brochures, broadsides,
sheet music, printed maps, advertising art, playbills, restaurant
menus, scrapbooks and memorabilia, almanacs, proof sheets, children’s books, religious tracts, and other items printed between 1800
and 2000. The task force has not focused on these collections because,to the extent that they are rare or unique and constitute primarysources, institutions that hold them do not dispose of them. Nevertheless, retention of these materials does not guarantee their survival. These collections are invaluable intellectual and cultural resources, and they must be considered in any national preservation
strategy. While these materials fall outside the scope of consideration
here, it is important to emphasize that these collections warrant separate investigation. Indeed, the ARL recently completed a study of
special collections within its membership that underscores the needto devote attention to the stewardship of these types of collections(Panitch 2001). The report points to a number of areas, including but
not limited to preservation, that demand fresh approaches as well as
new resources. The task force recommends that such studies be extended to non-ARL libraries that hold special collections, that theneeds of these collections be identified, and that a strategy for devising and funding cost-effective solutions be developed.
3.2.3 Creating Surrogates: Filming versus Scanning

Surrogates are created for one of two reasons: to create copies ofworks too fragile to use or to replace items in imminent danger ofdisintegration. In the former case, a rare book or collection of broadsides may be scanned and the originals retired from use, except under extraordinary circumstances. For materials that are on their lastor next-to-last use, the content is reformatted onto a more stable me-Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

dium, such as preservation microfilm, or is photocopied onto acidfree paper. For these types of books and other items that are in current demand, most libraries create paper copies, a far more convenient mode of access than is microfilm. In most cases, the source isphotocopied onto acid-free paper; however, at libraries with active
digitization programs, the source materials are often scanned and thescans are used to recreate the original volume on acid-free paper on
demand. The question that then arises is what to do with the original. This issue is addressed in Section 3.2.4.
Microfilming remains the gold standard for preservation reformatting of low-use materials. With proper storage and handling,preservation microfilm can remain faithful and legible for a century
or more. Film is still considered to be the best medium for preservation of images. But microfilm is just that—images—and no more.
Digital reformatting that includes optical character recognition(OCR) adds functionality, including the capability for full-text
searching.
Given the value added by digitization, why isn’t all reformatting
digital? The chief reason, besides the often higher cost of scanningand creating searchable text compared with filming, is that there is as
yet no reason to be confident that digital files will last as long as microfilms, or be as easy to manage over time.15 The preservation community has given much thought to making preservation microfilm
whenever digital scans are made or to converting preservation microfilm into digital scans (Chapman, Conway, and Kenney 1999), but
few libraries have embraced this more costly approach. Even though
the money goes toward ensuring preservation after creating access,funders tend to be reluctant to put money into preservation when
the same money can be put toward enhancing access to somethingelse.
The investment taxpayers have made, through the NEH, to create microfilm copies of brittle books could be leveraged to create digital scans of those books for ready access. This notion, however, haselicited little enthusiasm. Part of the reason is that the books thathave been microfilmed are often low-use items. As one expert has
written, “Brittle books have been selected for filming because they
have potential research value, but are low priority for current researchers and so can be put on film for storage even though it is an
awkward access medium” (Gertz 1999). Digitization of low-use special-format collections, by contrast, is common. This predilection toscan special collections rather than monographs is based in part on
the idea that special-collections materials—maps, photographs,
manuscripts—have traditionally received little use because they exist
in single copies in one collection. Once made easily accessible, thesematerials may become high-use items.

15 For a full discussion of the technical, legal, financial, and administrativecomplexities of ensuring the longevity and integrity of digital files, see Task
Force on Archiving of Digital Information 1996. The problem of preserving
digital information is treated briefly in Section 3.4 of this report.

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The Evidence in Hand

One significant exception to the practice of not scanning low-use
print materials is the Making of America (MOA) program at the University of Michigan and Cornell University. This digitization program focused on brittle American monographs and journals from thelatter half of the nineteenth century, and the selection of materials
was coordinated between the two libraries. This conversion of brittle
American monographs and periodicals has created an interesting
and largely unanticipated result: the MOA journals at Cornell receive
thousands of hits weekly. The beneficiaries of the project are many.
For example, a graduate student used the publications as researchmaterials for his dissertation. They enabled him to complete his studies from abroad when his wife’s job took them out of the UnitedStates. William Safire noted the value of mining the text for earlyuses of words and phrases and cited MOA publications scanned using OCR as a rich source for nineteenth-century texts (Safire 2000). A
high school student found the ideal material for a term paper, while
a company in Detroit located an engraving of Daniel Boone, which
they intend to make into a poster to commemorate the city’s 300th
anniversary. The visibility of digitized materials on the Web has facilitated their discovery, resulting in usage that greatly outstrips that ofthe paper copies that were slowly decaying on their shelves. A dedicated researcher may have consulted the print copies, but the secondary school student, the genealogist, the lexicographer, and theinsurance company are unlikely to have engaged with the paper volumes as they are able to access these digitized publications on theInternet.16
A recent study on how humanities scholars work in this evolving information environment, based on surveys and case studies, reports a similar trend in preferences for electronic access to print materials via Web-based data repositories:. . . the scholars all had access to a number of full-text databases
published by Chadwyck-Healey, the Women Writers Online
project from Brown University, and full-text journals from theJohns Hopkins Muse project and from JSTOR. Few scholars
mentioned using these full-text resources, but the ones who had
were hooked on what they could offer and particularly
appreciated those products that provided access to primarysources (Brockman et al. 2001, forthcoming).

The scholars who were “hooked” reported that the searching
techniques available were especially prized. The report noted that“the thoroughness with which searching is possible across any of thecorpora covered by these databases means that once they have beenrecognized by a group of researchers in a particular field, their use is
obligatory.”
The observation that use is “obligatory” means that these scholars are now able to avail themselves of otherwise-scarce texts. Wom16 This transformative effect is further borne out by JSTOR, another project that isbuilding a dynamic database from the static pages of journals. For more
information, see Section 4.4.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

en Writers Online was cited specifically for both research and teaching uses. The types of searching are novel as well, being inaccessible
to manual research; they include such techniques as keyword searching, pattern identification, and an abundance of searchable elements.
Finally, the database created a contextual mass of different editionsof the same work that allows collation and comparison among versions. In addition to reporting use of the larger commercial databases, a few scholars recounted using smaller, noncommercial Webbased projects devoted to individual authors.
All these instances testify that scholars are growing more comfortable with digital surrogates of texts. There is a need to develop
and apply methodologies to track the growing use of large digitizedcollections and to evaluate how researchers use these aggregations.
Their increasing use also raises the question of what value there will
be for libraries to maintain their hard-copy collections of these texts,
when the same collections, without gaps and items missing from the
shelves, are accessible from a computer 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world. Duplicative collections of materials that are notrare and are readily accessible on the desktop will have lost much of
their original reason for being: to provide local access. What will thenext generation of scholars, many of whom will have grown up withJSTOR, MOA, and other databases and find the very notion of having to retrieve hard-copy journals from stacks during library hours ahindrance to research, think of the journals and monographs that
languish in dead storage? How much will a university or college be
willing to pay for digital access and also for keeping hard copies?
How do we ensure that enough originals are kept and are available
for present and future use?
Although we are far from having a comprehensive body of primary and secondary literature readily available for use from thedesktop, there is every reason to believe that within a decade, significant corpora of texts will be available in a number of fields. It is not
too early to plan for the eventual disposition of the scores, or even
hundreds, of duplicate copies of individual items that scholars, voting with mouse clicks, prefer to use online. The question is notwhether libraries should keep hard copies of them. Of course theyshould. The real question is, in a world in which access is no longer
tied to physical possession, let alone ownership, which institutions,and how many institutions, will take the responsibility of ensuring
the preservation of and access to hard copies? Information technologies may allow libraries to develop a system of registration or otherkind of tracking that can allow linking local preservation decisions
and investments to the changing needs of a national and international research community (Greenstein 2001). And with new models of
distributed preservation responsibilities facilitated by digital technology, shared among libraries, must come financial and legal support
for those actions taken on behalf of the group.

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The Evidence in Hand

3.2.4 Responsible Retention Policies

Books are totemic objects that have developed a powerful status overcenturies, both for their content and for their physical significance.
At the same time, books, like other objects, have always been culturalvariables. Codices were routinely expunged in the Middle Ages,
their writing scraped off to make room for a new work, which, inturn, might be effaced by a later generation. That said, task force
members testified repeatedly to the symbolic value of the book andto the cultural significance of the library both as a building and as amental construct. They asserted that responsible stewardship is necessary to strengthen and reinforce those values. The spiraling costs ofbasic library functions and the added demands of new and more expensive services and collections cannot be allowed to put libraries
and their missions at risk. To ensure the continued accessibility ofcurrent library collections into the future, not to mention the extension of access to those collections through networked resources,
economies of scale, some of which entail the forging of cooperative
enterprises, must be achieved. The technical infrastructure, financial
resources, and public support must also be secured to sustain thoseactions.
As a way of envisaging how responsible retention of reformatted
materials might be reconciled with the economic realities of preservation, librarians can look to archivists for sound guidance (Kenney
1996). The benchmarks of sufficient quality film or digital capture
include the following:• The scan has captured all informational content—color, originalformatting, full content, or whatever else is important in thesource document.
• The document is fully accessible through a defined indexing-andretrieval scheme.
• Access to the digital file will be maintained over time, and thedata will be protected from loss, corruption, and technological obsolescence.
A consortium of leading American research libraries has proposed benchmarks for digital capture of text and image for libraries
that posit technical specifications that would meet these requirements. If adopted and widely practiced, these would go a long way
to building digital files on which researchers could rely for someminimal levels of capture and fidelity (DLF 2001a).
Once a library has created scans of sufficient quality to serve asfull surrogates, it should put in place a plan to maintain those resources over time. It should also consider the question of what to dowith the original source material. A plan for maintaining the files
over time may one day become routine, but at present there are very
few libraries or archives that can or would assert that their digitalassets are secure for more than a few years hence. There is a need forwhat might be called digital service bureaus or utilities that would
provide such services as scanning, managing files, delivering files tolocal users, and long-term archiving. This infrastructure needs to beReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

in place before most libraries and archives could develop routine,
cost-effective digital services.
Any scanned material that is rare and of artifactual value should
be handled with care during scanning, and retained afterward, even
if retired from active duty, and stored to prevent further damage.
Items that are common, such as journals, and that have content value
but little artifactual value may also be sent to storage. However, if
hard copies exist at other sites, there is no compelling reason to retain them, unless the local patrons have a history of using hard copy
even when digital files are available. What is important is that researchers who do need hard copy should be able to locate and retrieve it with relative convenience. In many cases, this may mean developing shared repositories for originals, used and supported byseveral libraries that store their materials in one site and are able,
thereby, to create richer and often more comprehensive shared collections. The custodians of artifacts need to design a plan that strives
for the most comprehensive coverage of given journals or subject
matter. This would almost certainly entail collaboration by the repositories of the original materials, support from their local constituencies, and concurrence that acting for the greater good might engender some local inconvenience. The Five-College Library Depository(see Section 4.1) is a model for this kind of shared storage. Such a repository might be able to afford collections services such as in-housepreservation facilities, or even scan-on-demand services, that single
institutions could not develop and sustain alone.
Promoting better understanding of the importance of the artifact
will require a clear, succinct framing of the issues and structured discussions. The objective should be to develop commonly understoodand widely endorsed approaches to the problem of caring for anabundance of materials with limited resources. There will never becomplete agreement: the matter of what to preserve and how tomake that accessible will never be considered resolved for all time.
Instead, interested parties should develop and declare a basis formaking those decisions that must be made in the immediate future.
The task force’s investigation of the print record has confirmedthat there is a great need for the identification and preservation of
numbers of important artifacts. Materials that are unique can be
identified and preserved. But there are large categories of printed
materials that exist in abundance and do not have high market or
exhibition value, but are important nonetheless because they exemplify a genre and a way of recording information and communicating. For these materials, the need for the identification is especiallygreat. Such things as antislavery pamphlets, election broadsides, andsermons printed as circulars are distinct genres that have value but
are unlikely to survive in toto. A measured plan to save numbers ofsuch genres will probably succeed in securing funding for preservation; a general alarm about their status probably will not. It is important that scholars work with librarians to identify and define categories of materials and locate the finest and best-preserved specimens.

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The Evidence in Hand

30

Beyond specific genres of printed ephemera, there is a need for arepository of American imprints—what one of the task force advisers
called a “Federal Reserve of National Literature”—that would ensure that an archival copy of American imprints is preserved. The
American Antiquarian Society (AAS) has been working for decades
to create a deposit of record for American imprints up to 1876. Other
than AAS, there is no library or consortium of libraries attempting topreserve a record of American imprints. The Library of Congress,
despite the fact that it receives two copies of every copyrighted bookin America, does not have a program, or indeed a mandate, to preserve even one copy for posterity. It is worth exploring the possibilityof seeking congressional authority and funding to require the Library of Congress to send one of its two copies directly into storage
upon receipt and to be obliged to make a surrogate of that copy
available for use if the title becomes too scarce to find elsewhere. The
Library of Congress has congressional authorization to build additional storage for its needs, but does not have the authority to set
aside a copy for archival retention.
The Library of Congress is the working library of the legislative
branch of the United States government, and its collections are at theservice of the Congress. A request for an archival deposit system has
never been made to Congress, and members of Congress neither
know about nor understand the need for such a system. Congress,
however, has proved itself a champion of scholarship and librarypreservation in the past, when it authorized and funded the brittlebooks reformatting grants under the NEH. It acted then at the behestof scholars, who impressed upon it the irreplaceable value of the information printed on acidic paper. The task force recommends that a
consortium of scholars and librarians, working with the AAS, the Library of Congress, and other appropriate bodies, develop a strategy
for a series of repositories to assemble and preserve a full record ofAmerican publications. One such plan, for example, would have the
AAS responsible for materials before 1876; another body or groups
of institutions responsible for 1877 to the present; and the Library ofCongress responsible for all prospective archiving. This archival repository system would be in addition to the local or regional repository system proposed above, which would serve the needs of scholars routinely requiring originals and would be designed to provide
access to them. In contrast, an archival repository or series of repositories would be designed as a fail-safe mechanism that ensured thesurvival of an original, not ready access to one. The details of governance, deposit, access, and so forth would need to be carefully
worked out by a number of interested parties, including librarians,
preservation experts, and scholars.

3.3 Audiovisual
3.3.1 Sound and Light as Artifacts

Audiovisual materials present many of the same preservation challenges as do resources on paper. They are recorded on media that

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

decay and they are abundant, thereby forcing libraries and archives
to make difficult choices in acquiring and preserving them. Researchers’ demands for audiovisual products, like the demands for print
resources, change over time. This reinforces libraries’ sense that theyneed to collect masses of materials with no immediate demand insight, in case they eventually prove to be of research value.
At the same time, in large part because of the extreme fragility of
the recording media and the dependence on playback machinerythat quickly becomes obsolete, audiovisual materials present new
challenges to traditional notions of the intrinsic value of the artifact.17
For printed materials, the artifact is a single physical object that has
some measure of fixity. That fixity is largely dependent on the factthat the object has been recorded on a relatively stable medium. The
stability of the paper depends on its physical composition, the effectsof handling and storage on the original imprint, and other variables;
however, there is little confusion about what a book or a journal is
and what constitutes the original. Moreover, the role of the print artifact in research is fairly straightforward: it provides evidence, anddoes so through information that the physical object itself carries.
This information offers a means of ensuring the authenticity of an
object and of judging the veracity and accuracy of the information
contained in it. It also brings researchers in some tangible way closer
to the moment of creation of that object and, presumably, closer tothe intentions of the creator.
A simple example can be used to illustrate the variety of ways inwhich audiovisual technologies assault the fundamental notion of
artifact. Judged by any criteria, a film by Stanley Kubrick—Spartacus,
for example—is important to keep and make accessible to future researchers, even if estimations of its merit fluctuate over time. What
does it mean to preserve a film in its artifactual form? The Library ofCongress, which acquired this film through copyright deposit shortly
after its creation, defines the artifact as the original manifestation.18
The movie was a technological marvel during its day; however,
we have now discovered that the 65-mm negative and 70-mm prints
made from this negative both fade irreversibly, and sometimes dramatically, over time. What we have of “the original manifestation” ofSpartacus is no longer a physical object that provides accurate or
meaningful information about what viewers saw in theaters in 1960.
The original object was fixed onto a carrier that precludes the very
notion of stability. While there was a commercial effort recently torestore the film to a more or less faithful recreation of what it once
17 “Intrinsic value is the archival term that is applied to permanently valuable
records that have qualities and characteristics that make the records in their
original physical form the only archivally acceptable form for preservation.
Although all records in their original physical form have qualities andcharacteristics that would not be preserved in copies, records with intrinsic value
have them to such a significant degree that the originals must be saved” (NARA
1982, 1). See also Menne-Haritz and Brübach 1999.
18 The copy on deposit is likely to be in poor shape. Film companies routinely
use exhibition copies, which are no longer fit for screening, to fulfill their legal
deposit duty.

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The Evidence in Hand

was, that restoration is not an original artifact from the 1960s, but
one from the 1990s.19 Looking ahead to the 2060s, there is every reason to anticipate that 35-mm and 70-mm films will be orphans of atechnology that no longer exists, and that projectors to play themwill be relics from the past. If no one reformats Spartacus onto newtechnology, then we will have lost direct access to a film that was
crucial in the development of an important American artist who also
created Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This is a relatively uncomplicated example of what happens tothe concepts of originality, fidelity, stability, and fixity when information moves onto one of the most significant recording media of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similar examples abound for recorded musical performances and spoken-word documents.
While many humanists are familiar with print resources and the
copyright regime that governs their distribution and permits timely
preservation action, fewer scholars are familiar with the protocols
that govern audiovisual resources. Their manufacture, preservation,
and access protocols and, perhaps most significantly, the copyrightlaws that permit or restrict those protocols, are well-known only to
specialists. Moreover, the history of collecting these materials differs
dramatically from that of print resources. The following discussionof these matters, together with case studies in Section 4, provides
background and a historical context with which to grasp the challenges that these media pose to scholars and librarians.
The curatorial and preservation communities involved in audiovisual materials are widely dispersed—in media, government, andpublic and research libraries, as well as in museums, historical societies, and regional collecting institutions. There are as many conflicts
as there are common interests between the creative community (suchas film directors, photographers, and musical artists) and the rights
holders (such as studios, news services, and major media companies), or between researchers (folklorists, ethnographers, and linguists) and their subjects (the individuals, communities, and sovereign Native American nations who have been recorded). These
conflicts sometimes have serious commercial consequences, and thecommunities can come to blows over preservation issues such as colorization and letter-boxing, cropping and retouching, or enhancing
recorded performances for re-release on CD by cleaning up the noisein an original long-playing (LP) record. Because these resources often
have high entertainment and commercial value, the role of the marketplace must be considered in any strategy to preserve and makethem accessible for research. In other instances, for unpublished andnoncommercial recordings, serious ethical issues have arisen between some researchers and the communities that have been documented. This has led to new access restrictions on old bodies of evi19 Characteristically for the 1990s, the restorers tried to recreate what Kubrickwanted to make, not what the studio had released in 1960. For example, a scene
with sexual innuendo between characters played by Laurence Olivier and Tony
Curtis, which had not been included in the original cut but was restored in the1990 version of the film, became a talking point in the publicity surrounding therestoration.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

dence that beg the question of whether or not repositories should invest in preserving materials to which they may never be allowed to
grant access. Some of the intricacies of rights management, commerce, and ethics are discussed in detail in two case studies about
film preservation and folklore collections (see Sections 4.2 and 4.3).
We focus here on describing the scope of visual and sound resources
and highlighting some of the issues that affect artifactual evaluations
and preservation options.
3.3.2 Still Images

The member libraries of ARL reported holding more than 64 million
photographs, pictures, maps, prints, slides, charts, posters, cartoons,engravings, and other graphic arts in 1998–1999 (ARL 1999a). The
Library of Congress has more than 13 million items in its photography and print collections. Many special-collections repositories also
have significant still-image collections, often filed with printed, cartographic, or design materials in collections organized not by medium but by provenance or subject matter. No one knows exactly how
much of this type of material exists in the United States or where it isstored. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the majority of historical documents that are image-based are not in academic research libraries
but are scattered in historical societies, natural history collections,special-collections libraries, commercial archives, and local, municipal, state, and federal records offices. The charts that document landownership and management; architectural drawings and engineering records of the built environment; photographs taken in thecourse of collecting news or creating journalistic essays; and archivesof architectural firms, industrial design companies, and advertising
enterprise—all these collections constitute invaluable historical
records. While many companies take excellent care of their businessarchives and offer some level of preventive preservation for the still
images scattered throughout their records, most enterprises do nothave preservation strategies for their archives, lack resources to develop and implement such strategies, and may not even be awarethat they hold materials that are of great potential value to historians
and others. The task force recognizes that many collections that arepart of the visual record of this nation lie well outside the purview of
research institutions and that special efforts are required to identify
and properly preserve these materials.
Within research institutions, still-image collections have beenslowly coming into their own as primary source materials. In public
libraries such as the New York Public and the Library of Congress,
both of which have premier visual resource collections, most users
are professional picture researchers who are looking for images toreproduce in publications. There is still a gap between those scholars
who seek out visual sources as primary documentation and those
who come to picture collections because they are looking for material
to illustrate a monograph or an article. While professional picture
researchers will always constitute a significant portion of users inpublic institutions, there is evidence that the current and future gen-

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erations of humanities scholars will turn increasingly to visual documents for primary evidence.
There are several reasons for this trend in research methodology.
The first is chronology, pure and simple. The primary recording media of the past 100 years have been visual, and anyone studying that
period can—or in many cases must—rely on still or moving images
for information. A second reason is that the proliferation of photography and easy reproduction of images in magazines and books
have exposed the current generation to more imagery. Some believethat this has led to a rise in “visual literacy”; others argue that exposure to many images does not create the ability to “read,” or understand, an image critically—the true sign of literacy. (Despite the proliferation of imagery in everyday life, few graduate programs
outside the traditions of art history and archaeology teach students
the same critical approach to visual sources that they do to textual
sources. Reading documentary photography with an art historian’s
eye can be inappropriate for those pursuing other research agendas.)
The third reason is that the topics and methodologies of literary, historical, and sociological research have broadened to include many
phenomena that are not well documented in texts but are so in visual
resources. Gender studies is a good example of a field that relies on avariety of sources from a variety of disciplines and makes good useof nontextual materials for such things as the history of domestic life
(for example, illustrated magazines, advertising art, family photographs). There are also relatively new fields, such as environmental
studies, that end up relying on the inadvertent documentation of
built and unbuilt environments that would not have been remarked
upon in texts. This priority of image over text is encouraged by thedigitization of images. Visual resources perform superbly in an online environment.20
That said, what is the artifact in question? In the case of filmbased images, is it the print, or is it the film from which the print was
made? Sometimes the film has been developed and printed in a waythat makes the printed image significantly different from the image
captured on film. Most curators choose to collect both the medium oforiginal capture and the print, when this is possible.
In pictorial collections, the items that receive priority for selection and preservation include any work that is of artistic value or of acertain age, or that has been created by a well-known artist photographer, graphic artist, or cartoonist; has a significant provenance;
constitutes an institutional priority; and so forth. Original works—
vintage photographs and their negatives or original drawings—receive the best care. Color film and photographs are generally morefragile than are black-and-white film and photographs; however, any
photograph printed on resin-coated or acid paper is at risk.
20 Libraries with important image collections have only recently begun to hire
photo conservators. This is another indication of the increased importance ofvisual resources in research, although many conservators work not on materials
that are in demand in the reading room but that are being prepared for digitalconversion.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

Film-based materials are often served in a high-quality surrogate, such as a digital image, slide, or copy print, unless the researcher is primarily interested in the object rather than the image content.
A researcher using Toni Frissell photographs from the front of WorldWar II could be satisfied with copy prints if she is looking for general-level information about Frissell’s coverage of the war or various
activities on the front. Another researcher might be interested in seeing only vintage prints, negatives, and contact sheets that carry information about the entire project or shooting assignment, the original
sequencing of shots, how the negative was cropped and printed, andso forth.
One of the dilemmas of preservation is that the best conditions
for storing an object often compromise the object’s effectiveness forresearch. Still images, whether film or paper based, are often an integral part of a mixed-media collection. Such images might include
photos in a personal archive, illustrations in a book, or architectural
records in a business archive. Preservation would demand that theybe physically separated from the original collection and stored elsewhere in cold vaults. Each medium has its own storage requirements; for example, requirements for black-and-white film differ
from those for color.
There are large collections of documentary photography thatgain research value as they are supplemented by a range of secondary materials—notebooks, work files, and contact sheets—that enlarge the evidential base of the documents under review. In manycases, it is sufficient to create surrogates that can be kept with theoriginal collection. Copy photos or digital reproductions usually provide all the information needed, but creating high-quality surrogatescan be costly.
3.3.3 Moving Images

The catastrophic loss of silent film—the incunabula of moving images—that occurred before movies came to be seen as respectablesources for research should warn us of the perils of undervaluing
new media. What we have faced in film is not only a failure to keep
films that have been collected from undue deterioration but also afailure to collect films systematically at all. Fortunately, certain
events conspired in the last 15 years to draw attention to the lamentable state of film preservation and galvanize communities into action. This should serve as an example of what can and should bedone for other audiovisual sources.
While both public and private nonprofit archives have long beenworking to document and preserve film, it was the emergence of ancillary markets for resale of film inventories that moved the industry
itself to invest resources in preservation. As videotape playbackequipment became cheap enough for the consumer market, studios
predicted that recycling old films for reissue would be worth the investment. That led to the introduction of colorization, theoretically toenhance the appeal of old movies to consumers. Colorization andcropping to fit a television screen, in turn, galvanized the creative

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community around issues of original intent and moral rights, whichsparked a confrontation with commercial forces and a widening circle of discourse about the state of the global film heritage.
In 1988, Congress passed the National Film Preservation Act, creating the National Film Preservation Board and asking the Copyright
Office to investigate the colorization and material alteration to film.
By the time the film board was reauthorized in 1992, its focus had
moved from alteration to preservation in the broadest sense. A consequence of its work was that all the players—archives and libraries,
studios, artists, and distributors, each with competing interests—
were forced to identify their common interest in the integrity of thefilm heritage and to collaborate for the first time toward a common
preservation goal. This concern for the integrity of and continued
access to film was one factor in the development of a national strategy for preservation. It coalesced easily with other significant initiatives of the time, notably the formal establishment of the Associationof Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), which brought together the
nonprofit and for-profit professionals in film—archivists, technicians,
filmmakers, academics, and laboratory managers. The high-profile
efforts of filmmaker Martin Scorsese and the Film Foundation also
raised awareness of these issues among the public and creative communities. In 1993, the film board undertook a national study of preservation needs and the following year put forth a national plan (LC1994). In 1997, with congressional authorization to fund film preservation, the National Film Preservation Foundation opened its doors
with the financial support of the Film Foundation and the Academyof Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
That landmark film-preservation study addressed a broad range
of issues, including technical, legal, economic, and financial issues
around preservation. It helped document what had been created,
what had been lost, and what was at highest risk for loss. The firstorder of business was to document what has been lost, and that was
tricky. Written records, old journals and newspapers, and collectionsof film memorabilia provided clues. A mental reconstruction of thefilm industry at certain periods of time led to meaningful deductions
about what must have been and to an understanding of the distribution chain that could suggest where copies of films had been shown.
This, in turn, led to happily correct suppositions about where missing films could be located. The American film industry often shippedabroad films that, for various reasons, were never returned at theend of a run. Australia and the Czech Republic proved to hold significant American films thought to be long lost. An international collaboration is crucial to the ongoing reconstruction of the film record of
any nation.
Documentation is a serious challenge for the film community,
especially for noncommercial films. Because so much of what has
been created is either lost or in imminent peril of disintegration, information about what once was made and how it was distributed
and received can serve very important needs, even without the original itself. Film, after all, is a public medium with wide influence onReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

those who see it. One example of a documentation project on whichscholars and archivists have collaborated is the British Universities
Film & Video Council (BUFVC). It has created a database to document what newsreels were shot and shown in theaters, even thosenewsreels that no longer exist.
From these state-of-film data, the National Film Preservation
Board and its collaborators developed a strategy for preserving films
that was based on a clear division of labor. Studio-produced and-distributed films are preserved by a series of collaborative and unilateral arrangements. Because studios now see their old films as assets, they are preserving the artifact and its economic value. Studios
are building new storage facilities. But while many studios preservea significant portion of their inventory, a very large portion of films
are actually preserved and stored at the four major film archives (theLibrary of Congress, UCLA, the George Eastman House, and theMuseum of Modern Art), often with financial assistance from thestudios.
The National Film Preservation Board’s study also highlighted
an array of noncommercial films, from independent art films to documentaries and home movies, that are vital parts of the historical
record. Some “home movies,” for example, were shot at an internment camp for Japanese Americans. Because these films and theirimportance have now been identified, public and private support for
funding their preservation has emerged. The National Film Preservation Foundation was established to coordinate these preservation efforts. Its approach is to find funding from a mix of private and public
sources to regrant to those repositories—historical societies, regionalfilm archives, local museums—for the purpose of undertaking preservation work.
The preservation challenges are complex, and the solutions are
expensive. Film-based materials need to be protected not only fromtheir inherent chemical instability but also from the mechanical damage incurred by running a reel through a projector. A master negativeneeds to be properly stored and used only to produce intermediaries
that can be used for creating access copies (either film or tape). Original materials for old films, no matter how badly deteriorated, need
to be saved in the event that a new technology comes along that can
extract more information from them. The four major film archives in
the United States all keep original materials.
There is much dissension among preservation experts about
whether analog materials should or should not be preserved in digital form. With respect to film, the important thing to note is that thephysical artifact itself is an endangered species that warrants special
measures to ensure its survival. Few institutions have taken on theburden of preserving film. The best practices that have emerged include retaining as much of the original material as possible, including any supporting materials that provide further evidence of thefilm’s original state or that can be used to restore lost portions offilms. For the sake of preserving the original materials, researchers
are given access to reformatted versions. Technology is increasing the37

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fidelity of reformatting so successfully that most researchers do notneed access to the original.
3.3.4 Recorded SoundThe heritage of recorded sound is imperiled because the industry
that manufactures currently acceptable preservation media—primarily analog reel-to-reel tape—is phasing them out, along with the
playback equipment needed to render the encoded information intelligible. Sound recordings seem to be especially vulnerable to technological obsolescence. Anyone who grew up with 78s, 45s, and LPs,
then cassettes and CDs, and now reads about (or downloads files
through) Napster and Gnutella, is aware of this shifting landscape.
Nonetheless, these consumer formats have remained remarkably stable relative to the industry standards with which the preservation
community has to keep pace. One expert reported the following to
the Library of Congress:
Most industry representatives report that their audio and video
products—media and systems—will all be digitally based within
the next five years or less. This abandonment of traditional
analog technology has come alarmingly fast and in dramatic
fashion. Access, even on a limited basis, will need to become
digital. Master preservation copies will need to become digital(Storm 1998, vi).

Many people disagree about whether digital preservation of film
is necessary for analog films, because commercial entities still shootwith old-fashioned film stock. Editing is now done primarily on digital equipment, and some major filmmakers—George Lucas most famously—are shooting with digital cameras. As long as film stock
continues to be manufactured, the debate will go on.
Recorded sound is a different matter. In this case, members of
the preservation community will soon find themselves without thetape and equipment they need for analog reformatting. Acquiring
the equipment needed to transfer analog to digital is a huge capital
expenditure—one that many institutions that hold valuable recordings are not prepared to make. Consequently, many collecting institutions will have to outsource their preservation reformatting. Such a
process is fraught with risk because few laboratories specialize in theart of old media.
Among the most significant repositories of sound recordings are
the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the New York Public
Library, and a number of academic institutions, including Columbia,
Yale, Syracuse, and Stanford Universities. There are also important,but smaller, collections such as those of whale sounds at Scripps Oceanic Institute and Cornell University’s ornithology collections. Folklore and linguistic materials abound in the personal collections ofmany scholars. Some type of preservation needs to be done for these
items as well, because they constitute primary data for these scholars’ research. If one of these personal, unpublished, and often uncataloged, collections goes, the evidence base for that scholar’s workReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

also disappears. It is fair to say that for field recordings that exist on
various tapes and cassettes, the artifact itself has little to no value;
the chief mission of preservation is to rescue the information on
those media before it disappears. It is crucial that scholars attend totheir own collections, and they that they do so now.
Perhaps the most important thing that scholars can do to preventthe loss of these documents is to recognize their value and to lobby
for support for their preservation. The U.S. Congress, largely in response to pressure from constituents and from the industry, recently
passed the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000. Modeled ona similar act for film preservation, it calls for public recognition of
the value of the nation’s sound heritage and for a survey to document the state of recorded sound. (See Appendix VII for the full law.)
Until that survey is completed, it will be hard to assess accurately
what is imperiled.
A significant part of the identification problem is that, outside
the field of classical music, sound recordings have not been incorporated into the canon of bona fide research resources until recently.
The copyright regime has been slow to grapple with the fact of recording. Recorded sound has been covered by the copyright code
only since 1972. Even when one admits popular and ethnographic
music into the fold, libraries have collected chiefly published recordings. Published materials have not been readily incorporated into thebibliographical systems of libraries, and unpublished materials havealmost never been included in these systems. Researchers havefound that commercial catalogs are the best sources for the initial
phases of a search of published recordings. For unpublished materials, which constitute the core collections of most anthropologists,
ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and linguists, few if any points of access are available. Scholars who are themselves creators of documentation should start thinking about access and preservation issues at
the moment they create the documentation, from getting informed
consent from subjects so that rights to access for various purposes
will not later become a problem, to using best practices for recording,describing, and storing materials.21
At present, selection of audio for preservation, like that of moving
image material, is based on an assessment of the following factors:• cultural value of the item
• historical uniqueness of the item
• estimated longevity of the medium• current condition of the item• state of playback equipment• access restrictions• frequency of use

21 For a comprehensive view of audio preservation and best practices forrecording, see the Web site of the Photographic and Recording Media Committeeof the Preservation and Reformatting Section of the American Library
Association. Available at http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/bytopic/audio/.

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When the access copy or preservation copy does not adequately
capture the information, it must be retained for future use because of
the probability of advances in technology.
3.3.5 Broadcast Media

Broadcast media—radio and television—are the stepchildren of theaudiovisual media. While everyone acknowledges their reach acrossthe country and their power to shape public perceptions, interests,
and thinking, few institutions take them seriously as sources of historical information, at least as evidenced by how few collect them.
Vanderbilt University collects television and specializes in network
news. The Library of Congress has an unparalleled collection of
black-and-white-era television holdings and some significant radio
holdings, such as the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service
Collection. But in general, at both the national and the local levels,
what gets broadcast is woefully under-documented.
There is little local collecting, yet because broadcast media are
the equivalent of newspapers in another era, the most significant materials are generated locally and should be collected and preserved at the local, not national, level. Those who decry the loss ofnewspapers from the past are well positioned to raise awarenessabout the present need to save broadcasting, because what they mostvalue about old newspapers is present in the newer forms of newsand entertainment—exquisite sources for popular opinion, advertising, and cultural phenomena of all types.
The National Historical Records and Publications Commission(NHPRC), a body of the National Archives, has recognized the problem and become a leading funder of local television news collection.
The Library of Congress has been authorized to create an archival
record of national radio and television through the American Television and Radio Archives program. However, the state of local television news collections across the country is, in the words of an expert
report, “extremely desperate” (LC 1997, 91). The state of collectionsof non-news television and of radio of all sorts is equally deplorable,
if not more so.
The Library of Congress report on the state of television and video preservation (1997) lays out the scope of the problem and proposes a national plan of shared responsibilities to ensure that at least
some of the television and videotape in the country will survive.
Should these broadcast documents not survive, it would be an irreparable loss for present and future generations. Scholars can play a
crucial role in making the academic communities of which they are
members, as well as the public, aware of the value of this documentation, the extent of the challenges to future access, and the efforts
under way to preserve these materials. It would be ironic and sadindeed if this generation of scholars, using ephemera and other artifacts of the nineteenth century to reconstruct the history and consciousness of that time, were to do nothing to articulate the need tosafeguard the comparable artifacts of this era.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

To the extent that preservation funding follows closely what thescholarly community has declared to be of research value, all the audiovisual formats discussed in this report suffer at present from lackof advocacy by scholars. But the task force recommendations cannot
assume that significant additional funds will be forthcoming simply
because the need for them has been identified. University librarians
and administrators alike have testified to the task force that preservation budgets today are remaining flat or, in real dollars, shrinking.
There is no reason to believe that this trend will not continue. If somebase funding were to become available for reallocation, it would
surely go to meet the greatest faculty need—the purchase and licensing of electronic resources. However, in the area of film, television,
recorded sound, videotape, and other audiovisual media, partnerships beyond the academy are critically important, and the nationalpreservation plans that are in place, or will be so shortly, must claim
the time and attention of the scholarly community.

3.4 DigitalAt first, digital information objects appear to be outside the scope ofwork of the task force, charged as it was to investigate the role of theartifact in library collections. After all, what is an artifact if not aphysical object? And what is digital information if not intangible,
available to be “output” to any number of media for access but having no intrinsic physical form and not bound by the temporal andspatial constraints of print, visual, and sound resources? Is it not digital information itself that is threatening to replace, or at least displace, the physical collections that libraries hold?
It is in part the phenomenal growth of digital information in libraries that prompts this examination of the nature and importanceof physical artifacts for research and teaching. Digital technology ischanging the ways in which researchers and teachers are getting access to information and in some cases obviating the need to consult
an original. The demand for electronic resources and the infrastructure needed to support their access and maintenance is affecting thebudgetary climate in which artifactual preservation must fight for its
share. Finally, the flooding of the information landscape by “nonartifactual” intellectual property influences our understanding of thenotion of the artifact in ways that beg scrutiny. It is for reasons suchas these that digital formats warrant special attention.
Thus far, the task force has focused primarily on the value of digital conversion for the purpose of access to originals—on the creationof surrogates of nondigital works to overcome obstacles created byscarcity or physical fragility. With respect to original artifacts, the salient questions to pose about digitized representations are as follows:• When can a digital surrogate stand in for its source?
• When can a digital surrogate replace its source?
• When might a digital surrogate be superior to its source?
• What is the cost of producing and maintaining digital surrogates?
• What risks do digital surrogates pose?

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In print, there is a great deal of secondary literature that is amenable to digitization. There is also a great deal of primary source material—dime novels, vintage photographs, and various ephemera—
that, because of its scarcity, could be more widely accessible were it
in digital form. Other items—for example, oversize materials such as
posters, or books in fragile states—are easier and safer to use in theform of digital surrogates. The research tools available for digital materials, such as full-text searching, may make the surrogates moreaccessible to specific types of research questions than the originals
are. Postscanning processes may make the use of damaged items easier because one can lighten dark patches or sharpen the resolution of
faded inks.
For visual resources and recorded sound, reformatting for accesspurposes is nearly always recommended or required for the sake ofpreserving the integrity of the source material. There is a growing
consensus that digital, rather than analog, reformatting will best
meet the demand for accessibility, fidelity, ease of reproduction, andcost-effectiveness, although significant issues still must be addressedin standards for access, preservation, and rights management before
this technology can fulfill its promise. For audiovisual resources, thefunding of the preservation work that is required remains a hurdle.
In sum, there are many ways in which this new technology cancreate adequate and at times superior access to information in physical artifacts. There are also instances in which no surrogate, no matter how splendid, will serve the scholar’s needs. Finally, the infrastructure needed to support and sustain such reformatting programsis still in its infancy.
Before one can recommend digital reformatting for the preservation of or access to artifacts with intrinsic value as physical objects, itwill be necessary to identify the hazards of digital representation of
artifacts and to determine the true nature of an artifact in a digital
environment. Physical artifacts bear all sorts of evidence about how
they were created or manufactured, who had possession of them atwhat time, how they were used, how they have changed, whether
the information they contain has been altered, and whether the alteration was intentional or inadvertent. What happens to this evidence
when the object is represented in digital form?
3.4.1 Artifacts and Artifactual Value in the Digital Realm

Libraries and archives have two distinct categories of digital objects—materials that exist only in digital form (“born-digital” information) and materials that are digitized versions of analog source
materials (“reborn-digital” information). The two categories can exist
side by side on a server, and the information technologists responsible for the maintenance of those files do not draw distinctions between them in terms of treatments. From the researcher’s point ofview, however, the distinctions are great, and they will be maintained here.
Digital technology can represent all genres and types of library
and archival materials—textual, numeric, visual, and sound informa-Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

tion. Because the technology of creating and disseminating information through digital means is relatively new, society has appropriated many terms specific to analog information and used them, almostby analogy, to describe digital objects. This goes beyond such examples as referring to individual instances of files uploaded to computer screens as “pages.” It has also resulted in such awkward back-formations as “nondigital” information to mean everything that alreadyexists in analog form.22 These neologisms and appropriations haveconsiderably complicated the work of the task force, and none has
proved more vexing than the use of the word “artifact” in the digital
realm.
The simplest, and one of the oldest, denotations of the word “artifact,” as discussed previously, is a physical object on which information is recorded. The very value of the physical manifestation, together with the dependence on the physical medium, has createdproblems for preserving information printed on paper. That problem
deepens with audiovisual information objects, because the mechanical processes that produce and record audiovisual information produce physical artifacts far more fragile than paper is. The concept of
artifactual value is contingent not only on changes in cultural valuations but also on information technologies and their businesses—bethey printing presses and paper mills or film stock manufacturers
and playback equipment companies. All these complexities abound,and are perhaps even more problematic, in digital formats as well.
Some task force members argued correctly that an artifact issomething—anything—made by art and that it does not need to bephysical. This is one of several definitions the Oxford English Dictionary attests to the word. Nonetheless, the notion of physicality was
intrinsic to the working definition used by the task force, because its
central charge was to distinguish between those times when the researcher needs the original physical manifestation and those when asecondary or reformatted manifestation is sufficient. This is yet another example of how slippery a concept “artifact” is at heart. To
speak of a “digital artifact” may even appear paradoxical, to the extent that “artifact” implies uniqueness or scarcity, whereas electronic
information is replicable to the point where “original” and “copy”
may lose their frame of reference. Consequently, when considering
artifacts that are originally digital, the first and possibly the most difficult question is “What is the artifact?” This question is discussed indetail in Section 2. We will return to it during the discussion of borndigital items.
3.4.2 Digital Surrogates

What is the utility of a digital surrogate? The answer to this question
depends, to a large extent, on the nature of the original artifact and22 Though inelegant, the word “analog” is preferred in this report to“nondigital,” because in the present context, the identity of these (analog)
collections is not derivative of their distinction from digital formatting. “Analog
collections” is also preferable to “legacy collections,” which has the misleading
connotation that all future collections will come only in digital format.

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the conditions of its use. Therefore, as a means of determining thevalue and appropriate use of digital surrogates for library holdings,
it may be useful to divide original materials into those that are rare
and those that are not, and to divide them further into those that are
frequently used and those that are infrequently used. There wouldbe, then, four possible cases:
1. Materials that are not rare and that are frequently used. In
this case, we can assume that preservation of the original is not aparticularly high priority (since the original is not rare); nevertheless,digital surrogates for such an object might be worth producing andproviding, for several reasons:• to reduce the cost associated with reshelving the object• to make the object simultaneously available to multiple users (forexample, through an electronic reserve desk)• to replace the object, thereby doing away with the cost of housingit
The first two are obvious and uncontroversial benefits. The thirdis potentially problematic, even if the object in question is not rare,
because it is not obvious that digital surrogates provide all the functionality, all the information, or all the aesthetic value of originals.
Therefore, while it may be sensible to recommend that digital surrogates be used to reduce the cost and increase the availability of library holdings that circulate frequently, the decision to deaccession aphysical object in library collections and replace it with a digital surrogate should be based on a careful assessment of the way in whichlibrary patrons use the original object or objects of its kind. It is notnecessary that the digital surrogate possess all the qualities and perform all the functions of the original, but it is necessary that the digital surrogate answer to the identifiable needs and expectations of
those who frequently used the original.
2. Materials that are not rare and that are infrequently used.
Many libraries now store infrequently used books and other materials in long-term storage facilities. Those materials are retrievable andavailable to library patrons, but only after a wait of two or threedays. With such materials, digital surrogates might• help users to determine whether recalling an object from longterm storage was worth the wait—and worth the library’s effort• increase frequency of use (by providing searchable metadata, forexample)• reduce costs by replacing the object with a digital surrogate
The first two are obvious and uncontroversial benefits, and thethird comes with the caveat that the digital surrogate should answer
to the identifiable needs and expectations of those who (in)frequently
used the original. At some point, especially with infrequently usedmaterials that are not rare, libraries might be expected to evolve a
calculus that balances functionality with actual use in order to help
decide when digital surrogates that provide most of the functionalityof originals are acceptable.
One other point needs to be raised, especially here, where we are
discussing the component of library collections that has the leastReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections“market value.” Libraries, as an institutional and cultural community, need to consider whether these infrequently used and commonly
held materials are, in fact, being preserved in a concerted and deliberate way in their original form by any one (or more than one) library. If they are not, the sources for digital surrogates that are common today could easily become rare, or nonexistent, tomorrow. Thisis the substance of Nicholson Baker’s objection to libraries’ practiceof discarding their newspaper holdings. If 50 libraries are holding
the same issues of the same newspapers in original form, at great expense and with limited use, then it is difficult to make the case that
all of them should pay to house, shelve, reshelve, and preserve theoriginals. However, if 49 of those libraries, over time, have replaced
their physical holdings with digital surrogates, one certainly hopesthat the fiftieth library would be aware that its physical holdings
were now rare, and therefore subject to considerations outlined directly below under cases 3 and 4.
3. Materials that are rare and are frequently used. In this case,the principal (and very obvious) benefits of digital surrogates are• Preservation: By standing in for some uses, the digital surrogate
reduces wear and tear on the original object; and• Access: By providing access that does not impose wear and tearon the original, the digital surrogate makes rare objects more accessible.
Few would argue that digital surrogates should replace truly
rare materials. Digital technology and techniques of digitization are
so new, and are developing so rapidly, that we cannot be confident
that we have devised the best method for extracting and digitally
representing information from any analog source—whether it is a
printed page, an audiotape, or a filmstrip. Nonetheless, digital surrogates could, in many cases, stand in for rare and frequently used materials, and could thereby aid in the preservation of originals.
4. Materials that are rare and are infrequently used. On the faceof it, these materials seem the least likely to be represented with digital surrogates, if only because digitizing is expensive. On the other
hand, if the cost of housing a rare but infrequently used object rises
high enough, then digitizing and deaccessioning that object may become an attractive possibility. Here again, libraries need to be awareof the actual or potential rarity of even those materials used infrequently today. Tomorrow, those may very well be the most valuableof artifacts, perhaps for users, or uses, that one could not predict today.
The basic questions, and their answers, are therefore as follows:• When can a digital surrogate stand in for its source? When it answers to the needs of users.
• When can a digital surrogate replace its source? When the source
is not rare.
• When might a digital surrogate be superior to its source? In cases
where remote or simultaneous access to the object is required,when software provides tools that allow something more than ordifferent from physical examination, and when the record of the45

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digital surrogate finds its way into indexes and search enginesthat would never find the physical original.
• What is the cost of producing and maintaining digital surrogates?
The cost of producing digital surrogates depends on the uniformity, disposability, and legibility of the original. The cost of maintenance depends on frequency of use and the idiosyncrasy of format. Beyond that, cost depends on technological, social, andinstitutional factors that are difficult or impossible to predict. Thisis an important reason for being cautious when one chooses to replace a physical object (the maintenance costs for which are
known) with a digital surrogate (the maintenance costs for whichare, to some extent, unknown).
• What risks do digital surrogates pose? The principal risk is thepossibility of disposing of an imperfectly represented original because one believes the digital surrogate to be a perfect substitutefor it. Digital surrogates also pose the risk of providing a partial
view (of an object) that seems to be complete, and the risk of decontextualization, i.e., the possibility that the digital surrogate will
become detached from some context that is important to understanding what it is and that it will be received and understood in
the absence of that context.
3.4.3 Access

While digital collections such as the William Blake Archive or the
Women Writers Online databases have been created (in part) to makedisparate items more accessible, scanning is but the first step. Ease ofaccess depends on how these items are described in cataloging andindex schemes and how easy it is to find and retrieve records of thesecollections in a catalog or database. The cost of cataloging, mark-up,
and other things that make up metadata (i.e., data about data) is often as high as, or even higher than, the cost of image capture. This
cost is also one of the few things about digitization that is not likely
to go down as a result of technological improvements, because it requires significant human input. It is important that descriptions ofdigitized materials be done in the most accessible forms possible, notin hand-created systems or forms that are commercially restricted.
Creating records for monographs and serial publications can be fairly straightforward and can allow direct linking to an institution’s online catalog. Visual resources can be marked up according to the controlled vocabularies found in Art & Architecture Thesaurus andThesaurus for Graphic Materials.
Fields that do not have a controlled and shared vocabulary—folklore, for example—are at a great disadvantage in a networked
environment. Many ethnographic and field recordings exist in analog formats that are rapidly deteriorating or becoming obsolete orthat have a limited life span. They are prime candidates for digitalreformatting. Saving the information by transferring it from audiocassette to digital files is only the first step. The files need to be described in conventional language to allow access. It is no accident
that textual corpora have been among the first to find new lives inReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

digital form. These are materials that have standardized forms andbibliographical standards. The machine-readable catalog (MARC)
record is a standard that allows libraries to ensure uniformity of description and to share information in a networked environment. Visual and sound resources, as well as manuscript collections, are lessstandardized in description and so are rendered less readily accessible online. Librarians and archivists are making efforts to devise descriptive systems that allow for uniform descriptions of archival collections; Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is among the mostwidely adopted system so far. Moreover, key professional associations in sound and moving image archives are developing best practices for digital capture and mark-up. Academic fields such as folklore, dance history, and ecology, which lack best practices indocumentation and research, would be well advised to agree on
ways to make their resources accessible through standardized descriptive practices. Access tools will be user-friendly only to the extent that users are involved in their creation. It is time to engage systematically in studies of research needs and researcher behaviors
online, so that the tool kit developed for their use will meet the users’ needs.
Another missing feature of the current digital library infrastructure is a central location from which to discover which analog collections have been digitized and how one can get access to them. Thereis much talk in the digital library community about building a registry or series of registries for digitized items, but so far, none exists(RLG DigiNews 2000, DLF 2001b, Greenstein 2001). One reason is thatorganizations that digitize use a great variety of standards, not only
for capture but also for description. Some items are described at theitem level, others at the collection level. Items that have been digitized more than once would not all appear in a search of the records
as they currently exist. Libraries are often short-staffed, and they cannot report regularly on what they are doing or planning to do. The
absence of such reports would jeopardize the timeliness and reliability of such a registry. No single body has agreed to act as an organizing agency to create and maintain the information, and it is not clear
from where the funding for such a body would come. The work ofsuch a body would include securing the information and ensuringthat changes in URLs were kept up-to-date. In the meantime, a number of associations and groups at the local, state, and national levels
have created databases about what they are doing. These, taken together, do not meet the researcher’s need to locate without great difficulty the digital surrogates of items he or she seeks.
3.4.4 Born-Digital Materials

Whereas digital surrogates always originate from physical source
materials, a born-digital item has no previous manifestation in physical form. It is entirely dependent on hardware and software for accessibility, storage, and long-term access. Anyone who has tried to
trace a citation to a digital source, only to find that the site no longer
exists, understands that dedicated maintenance and resources are

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required to keep digital sources alive, let alone up-to-date. Beyond
the problem of stability, it can be difficult to judge the authority orauthenticity of Web-based information.
Digital information is by its nature perfectly replicable. To distinguish between the first and the forty-first instantiations of a digital
file is a fool’s errand. But born-digital information is of very great
import for scholars interested in the artifact, for it challenges notionsof originality and uniqueness, and even of authenticity, fixity, andstability. That it does so matters greatly, because of the sheer quantityof information that is being created in digital-only form. In 1998–
1999, ARL libraries spent an average of $742,598, or a median of
10.18 percent of their materials budgets, on electronic resources (Jewell 2001). While still a small portion of what is spent on total acquisitions, this percentage is increasing each year. This category of materials would include databases such as the Inter-University Consortiumfor Political and Social Research data sets (the world’s largest archives of computerized social science data) or the Environmental
Systems Research Institute data and maps (a detailed set of data for
the United States and the world that includes census boundaries andmajor transportation features), and—increasingly—thematic researchcollections. Such examples as Ed Ayers’s “Valley of the Shadow”
Civil War site (Ayers et al. 2001) and Columbia International Affairs
Online, while largely based on digital surrogates, also include layer
upon layer of secondary or editorial work that is uniquely digital,
and the sum of the parts is wholly digital. Many of these new “digital objects,” as they are often called, have been created by scholars or
publishers or both. They have the same claim to intrinsic value that
any intellectual property created with analog technologies would
have. By far the largest portion of these electronic sources, however,is the science, technology, and medicine periodical literature, an increasing percentage of which is available exclusively in digital form.
Of the things we value in these materials, what is fungible andwhat cannot be separated from its carrier medium? How does one
begin to make that distinction? In many digital objects, the chief value is in the informational content of the file, and that content is as
good in one copy as in another. It is similar to the case of featurefilms, where the researcher will normally prize ease of access overfidelity to the original manifestation, within limits. Many researchers
are happy enough with laser-disc or VHS-tape versions of films they
are researching. So it is with digital information: ease of access is
usually its greatest value. A PC Word document viewed on a Mac
will still serve the access needs of the researcher. It is seldom important to seek out a PC to view that same document with full fidelity to
the look and feel of the environment in which it was created.
But are there equivalents in the digital realm to the intrinsic values we have defined for the physical artifact, namely, originality,
faithfulness, fixity, and stability? This is a subject of intense discussion among librarians, archivists, computer scientists, and security
experts. A detailed examination of these complex issues is beyond
the scope of this report. A summary of the major issues surroundingReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

the problem of authenticity is, however, necessary for understanding
the possible hazards of using digital information.
Originality in its simplest sense—that is, of “oneness”—is not ameaningful notion in the digital realm. Archivists have many waysof defining “digital original,” all of which may suffice to meet corerequirements for evidence. In a library context, however, the notion
is more or less bankrupt (Bearman and Trant 1998, CLIR 2000, Lynch1999). Faithfulness, by contrast, is not necessarily an empty notion. It
is true that the bit streams that make up a file can be changed without evidence of the change, regardless of whether it was intentionalor accidental. For example, someone who receives a forwarded
plain-text file that has had three paragraphs deleted from it would
not be able to see evidence of the deletion on a computer monitor.
Internal evidence, however, might lead an attentive reader to believethat “something is missing,” and if the file comes with a digital signature—a public key or other mechanism for objectively verifyingthat the file has not been changed since the key was generated—then
one does have some hope of determining faithfulness.23 Of course,
few researchers perform forensic examinations on the physical artifacts they view. Users trust that a source found in a library, for example, is more reliable than one found posted to a billboard. So, too,many researchers place more trust in resources found on a library
Web site than in information anonymously posted on the Web.
The issues of stability and fixity, however, are quite troublesome
for digital texts. For analog sources, stability and concrete form are
absolute requirements for proving the authenticity and provenanceof unique documents. The malleability of digital information, theease of creating several different and subtly tailored versions of digital documents for different audiences, and the difficulties of maintaining digital sources intact and accessible over time are similar tothe problems associated with archiving the international television
broadcasts cited in the previous section. Which version of a digital
document designed to evolve and grow over time is the one thatshould be archived? For interactive documents, what importancedoes the interaction have in defining the authentic document? It is
important that scholarly societies work with publishers and librarians to specify what should constitute the archived version of an ejournal article, for example, and who should be responsible for creating that final version. Efforts are under way to bring together
libraries and publishing houses to address the many questions thatsurround the archiving of scholarly journals (DLF 2001c). It is in theinterest of members of the academic community to join this effort.
As to the intrinsic value of the digital artifact, as opposed to thevalue of the content that might easily be reformatted onto anothermedium, what are those features that drop out when content is reformatted? It could be the text formatting, as anyone who has imported

23 See the application of digital authentication technology to electronic scholarly
editions, carried out by the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre. Available at:
http://idun.itsc.adfa.edu.au/ASEC/PWB_REPORT/Review.html.

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The Evidence in Handa file created in one word-processing program into another program
well knows. But in most cases, it is some sort of functionality that islost. Relational databases can export their data in a form that permits
another database engine to import that content, but the relationships
laid down among items in the original database will be lost, because
there is no standard way of encoding those relationships. Without
those relationships, much of the functionality of the database will belost as well. So, just as with analog sources, preservation of the digital artifact is successful to the degree that it maintains over time thechief distinctions of that object as digital—its functionality, its formatting, or whatever is important about the digital object for a particular use and a particular user.
3.4.5 Preservation of Digital Information

Computer scientists, librarians, and archivists have explored the subject of preserving digital information in depth for nearly a decade,and it continues to be a subject of active research. This section summarizes a topic that has been well covered by others.24
Like analog moving-image and recorded sound information,
digital information is both technology- and medium-dependent. Digital technology appears to be evolving even more rapidly than analog recording media have evolved. Hardware and software havechanged so quickly that information that has been recorded on one
software program often is at risk of obsolescence in only three orfour years. The media on which digital information is recorded,
whether it is magnetic tape or a hard disk, are vulnerable to a startling array of new risk factors, including magnetic fluctuations, separation of information from the substrate caused by mild environmental disturbances, accidental overwrites, and “bit rot.”
Precisely because the technologies used to encode, display, andenact digital information are changing so rapidly, the digital artifactthat goes untouched for 10 or 20 years may well be unrecoverable. Itsstorage medium might require hardware that no longer exists, thesoftware used to create it might no longer be available, or the operating system under which that software ran might be obsolete. Digital
files must be “refreshed” and magnetic tape “exercised” to ensurethat the bits keep their integrity and the recording medium does not
suffer undue degradation. This constitutes minimal-level preservation for digital files. There is no such thing as putting the text oneight-inch floppies, putting the floppies in storage, and being able toretrieve the text 50 years later. Digital preservation programs will
have to be much more active, and even aggressive, than book preservation programs are.
In the past, with information stored in more or less durable
physical objects, the task of preservation has been to stabilize and, if
possible, enhance the integrity of items (books, films, sound recordings) that had been around for generations because they had been

24 See, for example, Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information 1996,
Rothenberg 1995, Rothenberg 1999, Bearman 1999, and Granger 2000.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collectionsacquired by a library. Some judgment has been made about the intellectual or cultural value of the item, and the question for preservation is not whether, but how, to preserve the item. With digital information, whose life span can be as short as one software upgrade, thedecision to preserve must be made almost simultaneously with its
creation. This turns the traditional preservation paradigm on its
head.
The two most commonly advocated methods of preservation,
both of which involve concerted efforts by custodians, are migrationand emulation. Migration is essentially a moving of digital files fromold hardware and software platforms onto new ones. Migration is atranslation, and some measure of loss is inherent in the process.
What happens when one reformats word-processing files from an
old version of a program to a new one, or from a Mac platform to a
PC? The content of the documents is usually preserved, but the formatting is corrupted to one degree or another. Migration has occurred, and loss has been incurred. Yet most people who look back at
the costs and benefits of the process would probably decide that thebenefits of not having to rekey whole documents outweigh the tinkering necessary to restore the original formatting.
At the same time, there are categories of digital documents, mostof them nontextual, that might suffer unacceptable losses during migration. These include executable files, such as time-lapse simulations and interactive programs. For these, the goal is to preserve not
only the content but all aspects of the behavior of the original content
and of the software used to present it. This is what emulation is designed to do—create software that can simulate the hardware andsoftware environment in which a document was created. The technology of emulation is still in its early stages.
When considering artifacts that are born digital, the first andpossibly the most difficult question is “What is the artifact?” What
information or value inheres in the carrier medium? Is the equipment originally used for display part of the digital artifact? Does thesoftware that presents and actualizes the data qualify as a constituent
element of the artifact? Thinking again of the criteria for determining
intrinsic value in an artifact—as a way of understanding what thefeatures of an artifact might be—it is evident that there are a numberof practical ways in which these questions might surface.
The physical form of a document or program might be the subject for study if the records provide meaningful documentation orsignificant examples of the form. For example, the layout of a form
used for collecting data on the Web might reveal a good deal aboutotherwise-inexplicable aberrations, omissions, or misconstructions in
the data collected.
There are also aesthetic or artistic qualities that may require preserving, most notably digital art and literature (Lyman and Kahle
1998). Achieving that level of fidelity to the original, or original instantiation, would require running a program on originally specified
system hardware and software. Early computer games are a popularspecies of programming wizardry that inspire heroic efforts at emu-

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lation, or recreation of original hardware and software platforms, forreplay. One such emulation program can be found in Java, whichruns Kaypro (Z-80/CPM-based) software on contemporary Intel/
Windows-based systems. The challenges posed by preserving digitalart are manifold, because the art is often designed, like a game, toprovide real-time experience for the viewer—an experience that may
or may not be intended to be replicable. The Guggenheim Museumof Art has developed a program, Variable Media Initiative, that “encourages digital artists to help establish preservation guidelines long
before their equipment, code, and lives become history,” as Wired recently reported (Jana 2001). Through this program, artists can record
not only the technical specifications of a given work of art but also
the artist’s intentions or considerations for longevity.
A third form of digital preservation is the preservation of theoriginal hardware and software for use at some time in the indefinite
future. Similar to the saving of wax cylinders and the original playback equipment for listening, this is a strategy of last resort, one thatis not scalable for the routine needs of moving massive amounts of
information forward and making it readily accessible to users in the
future.
These examples suffice to show that the relevant features of adigital artifact could include more than the fungible information contained in an electronic file. Although the Kaypro example may seemfacetious, the many issues attendant to digital art and literature arenot. The questions that the preservation of these digital objects bring
forth are similar to those that collection development staff members
ask about preserving all sorts of digital information that is dependent
on specific software programs for its intrinsic value.
In many cases, the answer for libraries will be that they are, infact, primarily concerned with collecting, preserving, and providing
access to the fungible informational content of digital objects. In thatcase, the “preservation through handling” scheme is a likely winner;
digital information that is frequently used by patrons stands a betterchance of being migrated and refreshed, and therefore is more likely
to continue to be available in future generations, than is little-useddigital information. Indeed, migration may turn out to be a much
more frequently recurring problem than is refreshing, because “today’s optical media most likely will far outlast the capability of systems to retrieve and interpret the data stored on them” (Conway
2000). Regrettably, it is easier and cheaper to refresh than to migrate.
If libraries have reason to be hopeful in this regard, it lies in open,
nonproprietary standards such as JPEG for images, MPEG for video,
and SGML, XML, and XSL for textual data. There are still importantdata types for which no such standards exist (GIS data, for example).
However, the trend over the last 20 years—accelerated significantlyin the last decade by the advent of the World Wide Web—has been in
the direction of support for nonproprietary standards, even in proprietary software (Rosenthal and Reich 2000).25
25 That this general truth should not be taken for granted by the librarycommunity was recently and significantly demonstrated by the release of
Microsoft’s Windows XP, with its Internet Explorer 6 (which does not have native
support for Java) and its Windows Media Player (which does not have support
for the MP3 music format).

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

Another promising strategy under development is called
LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe). The basic principle of
LOCKSS is preservation through proliferation. An article in The Economist described LOCKSS as follows:. . . a network of PCs based at libraries around the world anddesigned to preserve access to scientific journals that are
published on the web. The computers organise polls among
themselves to find out whether files on their hard disks havebeen corrupted or altered, and replace them with intact copies ifnecessary. (“Here, There and Everywhere,” June 24, 2000, 92)

Curiously, this strategy flies in the face of the new logic of preservation and access in the digital world: that libraries should notbuild redundant collections in a networked environment, but should
develop cooperative collection development and preservation strategies. Duplication of effort is seen as not cost-effective. In the digital
realm, cold storage does not work. Born-digital artifacts will not benefit from living undisturbed in dead storage for years. On the contrary, digital artifacts seem to require preservation through handling.
Such active intervention would seem to obviate redundancy. Nevertheless, there is plenty of room for experiments in this new environment, and if the future proves to be anything like the past, thenmany of our initial approaches to ensuring longevity will be stoodon their heads.
With print originals, the “preservation through proliferation”
strategy of duplicative collections assumes that one copy is as goodas another, that is, that the value of the artifact is fungible and that itis the information, not the artifact, one wants to preserve. One copy
cannot serve the access needs of a large research community, and theonly way for two people to have access to a book is for each to havehis or her own copy. The copies cannot be shared in real time: If I
give you mine, I don’t have one. With digital files, the opposite istrue: If I give you the file for an e-book, you have it and I have it, too.
But a million perfect copies will still stand mute if we no longer understand how to read them.
3.4.6 Copyright: A Barrier to Preservation?

Libraries and archives are allowed to use copying technologies forpreservation purposes under an exemption of the copyright code.
When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act first appeared, there
was no exemption for digital materials. The copyright community
feared that it would be impossible to control the distribution of copied files, and that even those created for educational and preservation purposes would be a threat to the intellectual property rights of
their creators or publishers.
These concerns have been addressed in further legislation thatallows preservation copying, and technologies to encode data areadding desired layers of protection from infringement for rights
owners. The real threat to preservation in the digital realm is thatcopyright law is being finessed by licensing agreements. Libraries do

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not purchase electronic databases and do not have ownership of materials as they do of analog materials. Libraries do not preserve materials that they do not own. At the same time, however, publishers are
not in the preservation business.
The library and publishing communities are making efforts tocome to terms with the crisis that this situation may create (DLF
2001c). This is a matter that deeply affects scholars, as creators of intellectual property and as researchers and teachers wishing to gain
access to the published record. It is one more area in which scholars
must become familiar with what is at stake in negotiations between
publishers and librarians and be sure that their interests are considered and that their responsibilities—as writers as well as teachers—
are clear.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

4. Case Studies

4.1 The Five-College Library Depository: Combining
Collections to Provide Better Preservation and More
Comprehensive Collections of Print MaterialsT

he members of the Five Colleges of Massachusetts—Amherst,
Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst—are developing adepository library that will house collections from each of their holdings. They are also creating a cooperative collection-development
strategy that will take full advantage of the depository library.26
In deciding to take part in this joint project, each of the libraries
faced the following constraints:• a critical shortage of space to house growing collections• a reluctance of its governing body to build separate storage facilities• the need to implement the most cost-effective strategies for meeting users’ needs
The colleges’ effort to collaborate on collection development andmanagement, as well as storage, can serve as an exemplar of thestrengths and weaknesses of collaborative approaches to problem
solving.
The cooperative depository will be built at the Amherst Library
Depository facility, a former military bunker that was designed tosurvive a nuclear attack and to serve as a center for military operations in the event of a war. The facility was decommissioned long
ago, and Amherst College purchased the bunker from its second
owner, the Federal Reserve. The college retrofitted the bunker forsecondary storage and began using it in 1995.
26 This case study is based on A Collaborative Approach to Collection Storage: The
Five-College Library Depository (Bridegam 2001).

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The Five Colleges, in the words of the director of one of their libraries, “having taken successful consortial approaches to ordering,cataloging, circulation, subscription database management, and materials delivery in earlier collaborative efforts, explored ways to extend their cooperation to the growing problem of finding additional
space to store little-used books in their collections.” When the libraries first talked about cooperating to solve their storage needs, they
considered several options, from building a new facility to renting
space from a local commercial storage facility or from the nearest library storage facility (in this case, Harvard University’s facility,
which is about 100 miles away). Careful cost estimates led the library
directors to recommend developing something more radical andmore efficient—a shared library depository at Amherst.
In 1999, the presidents of the Five Colleges approved a plan tooperate a consortial library depository that would have a distinctive
mission and governance, and they assigned responsibility to an existing consortium, Five Colleges, Inc., to run the depository. There
would be a consortial ownership of materials sent to the depository(except for the holdings of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Library; as noted below), and duplicates would be deaccessioned. Materials would be housed by size, and the stacks would not
be open for browsing. The existing Five College online library catalogs would be updated to show the new locations of materials transferred to and retained by the depository. Materials deposited by thefour colleges would become the property of the Five-College Library
Depository. Because the University of Massachusetts, a public research institution, is required to retain ownership of its materials,
these would be shelved separately at the depository.
What obstacles did the colleges face in launching this collaborative endeavor? The first was to overcome the reluctance of some librarians and faculty members to transfer any materials off site. This
opposition was not unexpected; nonetheless, in many respects, thecolleges’ options were limited. Their collections were growing, butbudgets were tight. None of the institutions’ governing bodies was
willing to authorize funds for capital expenditures to house their libraries on site. Thus, the real issue was how the librarians and faculty could work together to make the transition equitably and withminimal disruption. In the case of Amherst College, for example, deciding which materials to move to the depository required extensive
collaboration between librarians and the faculty. When conflictsarose among faculty members—usually over materials of an interdisciplinary nature—the librarians negotiated a settlement.
Another obstacle was that of ownership. Among the first decisions was to move to storage the journals that are available online,
such as those mounted on JSTOR. By moving sets off site, the Five
Colleges would be able to create a complete run of any given journal.
By relinquishing ownership of that journal to Five Colleges, Inc.,
they would be agreeing to share ownership of and responsibility forcommon assets. Doing this might be easier for liberal arts colleges
than for large private research institutions, which feel a need to keepReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

ownership of library materials. However, the arrangement workedout by Five Colleges was flexible enough to accommodate the specific ownership needs of a public university.
A series of logistical concerns had to be addressed, from document delivery to service on weekends and holidays. There werestaffing and funding issues as well. As the collaborative effort moved
forward, the colleges found it easier to solve their problems by pooling resources. For some issues, such as staffing needs, the flexibility
afforded by a large body would prove to be essential.
The consortium established a Collection Management Committee to examine an array of matters, such as how to decide on acquisitions, what to do if one library decided to cancel a subscription thatit alone had, and what materials should receive priority for deposit.
The committee conducted research in most academic disciplines on
the five campuses to determine the access needs and preferences of
their faculties. It developed strategies to anticipate the recall of collections in cases of changing teaching demands. Finally, it determined that the long-term goal of the depository library would be todevelop “last-resort” collections of best copies, so that no user would
be without recourse to a hard copy of a title, yet the libraries would
not be burdened with excessive duplication. The Librarians’ Council,
which comprises the head librarian of each college and the Five Colleges, Inc., coordinator, makes decisions about the depository on thebasis of the committee’s recommendations.
What can this example of cooperative collecting and storing offer
to other libraries? First, libraries of all sizes have an increasing needfor off-site storage. Large libraries have been moving collections offsite for two decades, and several have built facilities that serve theircollections alone.27 (Some of these institutions—Harvard University
is one—are also willing to lease some of their underused storage
space to other libraries.) Many facilities have been built to serve several institutions in a region. Nevertheless, only one facility, the Midwest Inter-Library Center (renamed the Center for Research Libraries), was founded to manage cooperative acquisitions and preservation programs as well as to serve cooperative storage needs. The
Center for Research Libraries has evolved from a model intended toserve the collecting needs of Midwest libraries by focusing on rare
and little-used materials to its present profile, in which it serves 221
university and research libraries in North America and provides
them with access to heavily used foreign language materials, newspapers, and documentary series.
The advent of digital technology and document delivery by fax
have made the environment for collective storage far different today
than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. No longer do scholars need fearthat materials moved off site will be lost for casual use. Turnaroundtime at the Amherst College Library Depository is usually less than
27 A forerunner of the Five-College Library Depository, the Hampshire
Interlibrary Center [HILC], was established in the 1950s. HILC was disbanded
during the 1970s, by which time each of the contributing libraries had erectedlarger libraries and had reclaimed their collections.

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58

24 hours, and an increasing number of patrons are satisfied withdesktop delivery. As long as the concept of secondary storage has
been accepted on campus and users are satisfied with the levels ofservice provided, library managers can focus on how to use theshared repository to better serve the needs of both users and collections.
Whereas regionally based depository libraries have been seen
chiefly as a way to handle a space problem, the opportunity now isto achieve economies of scale for a number of collection-management tasks, from acquisitions to preservation. Willis Bridegam, director of the Amherst College Library, states that even for the Five Colleges, the chief incentive to cooperate was to solve the problem ofspace shortages.
They understood the economies that might be realized throughjoint staffing of a shared off-site library storage center. They saw
the potential advantage of being able to develop complete
periodical backruns from fragmented sets of the five individuallibraries. They supported the idea of choosing the best copy of abook or periodical volume of which there were duplicates forretention in a depository. They also thought that it would be
efficient to establish one conservation service at the bunker for all
the materials transferred there. Most of all, they were interested
in relieving the shelving space pressures in their libraries, andthey thought that a joint approach might be more likely to attract
external and internal funding (Bridegam 2001, 17).

Reaching agreement about the shared storage site, in otherwords, was aided and abetted by the press of short-term needs. The
participants’ experience of cooperation in sharing collections and cataloging, which had taken place over decades, had built trust among
the libraries. The Five College presidents encouraged collaborationand supported innovative problem solving. This project bears watching, and it should be well documented and assessed regularly by thelibraries and their users.

4.2. The Emperor Jones: When Preserving
Means Restoring

Preserving films of historical or artistic value often entails a physicaland historical reconstruction of what the film was in its original state
and judging that state on the basis of evidence from as many authentic source materials as possible. That means that the restoration of afilm may depend on the preservation of both film and non-film
source materials that contain information about the film in its socalled original manifestation. These sources would include documents that might reveal what the film looked and sounded like, e.g.,
negatives, positives, scripts, stills, publicity materials, contemporary
reviews, production company records, and copyright deposits. It
also means that film preservation can require good detective skills
and well-informed judgments about the cultural forces that shapedReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

the film at the time of its creation and later, as well as technical expertise in obsolete media, editing skills, and access to specialized
equipment and reliable sources of funding.
In 1999, the Library of Congress undertook a restoration of The
Emperor Jones as part of its contribution to the Treasures of American
Film Archives project, which was initiated by the National Film Preservation Foundation with funds from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The
Library staff’s first task was to determine what constituted the original film when it was released in 1933.28 There were several versions
available, each of them incomplete in one or another way. The version of the film best known to the public was released by the American Film Institute in 1969–1970. It had been assembled from two preWorld War II-censored 16-mm prints. Another version, derived froma heavily censored source in Canada, was distributed in videotape
format by Janus Film.
Preservation work began with gathering all extant versions andresearching nearly every aspect of the film’s production and distribution history. In this case, it is a history riven with controversy. Thatthe film exists in such bowdlerized form today stems not only fromthe fact that many considered its content offensive or objectionable
but that the lead actor, Paul Robeson, became a persona non grata
because of his outspoken left-wing politics. Cultural artifacts associated with such controversy are particularly difficult to preserve, yet
it becomes especially important to preserve them precisely for thosereasons.
The film is based on an expressionist-style one-act play by Eugene O’Neill, first produced in 1920 and revived four years later. The
1924 revival starred Paul Robeson. The play was successful, if controversial, among critics and theatergoers. The subject matter and language were racially charged, but the poetic vision and expressionist
staging made for compelling theater.
A small independent company produced the film in 1933. The
producers secured O’Neill’s permission to make the film, but the
playwright had no involvement in it. His only requirement was that
Robeson again play the lead role. (Robeson’s character was Brutus
Jones, a Pullman porter who becomes the lord of a Caribbean Island
and ultimately meets a violent death.) The film script, written by DuBose Heyward, had received O’Neill’s approval.
The film debuted in September 1933 and had a controversial
opening run. White and Black audiences generally acclaimed thefilm a success, while agreeing it was more of an “art film” than entertainment. The African-American press voiced objections, saying thatthe lead character conformed to negative stereotypes of African
Americans and that the language was replete with racial epithets.
28 The substance of this case study was relayed by Ken Weissman, head of the
Motion Picture Conservation Center at the Library of Congress, who supervised
the work described here. He generously made available records that documented
the work and additional background materials, and offered invaluable advice on
the general matter of film preservation and restoration. James Cozart andJennifer Dennis, of the Library of Congress, and Annette Melville, of the NationalFilm Preservation Foundation, provided additional expertise.

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The film played for only two weeks before its distributor, United Artists, began cutting certain parts that the critics had found objectionable.
These cuts, which included excising the word “nigger,” used repeatedly by Jones as well as some White characters; cutting depictions of Whites subordinated to or physically intimidated by Blacks;
and removing some suggestive sexual scenes, were not the first attempts at censorship of the film. Even before its general release, theproducers, under advisement from censors, cut a scene in which
Jones murders a White guard while serving on a chain gang and dialogue in which Jones describes guard brutality in prison (MacQueen
1990). As a result of prerelease editing, about two minutes was cut
from the film.
Other immediate post-release cuts included removal from thesound track of all instances of frankly offensive words and even theword “Light!” spoken when Jones orders his White flunky to ignite
his cigarette (the word was blanked out on the sound track but theimage is unaltered). There is a mix of cuts that could be inferred fromrough or jumpy spots in extant versions, but little unambiguous evidence about which scenes or parts of dialogue have been cut andwhen.
Library of Congress staff inspected all known sources of the film,
including elements held at the Library itself, the National Archives ofCanada, and the Museum of Modern Art. Staff members contacted
numerous people who might have reason to have an unknown print,
including some associated with the original production. They also
researched contemporary reviews to determine how long the filmran, and production company records to learn more about what had
been filmed. They obtained a copy of the shooting, or continuity,
script that had been sent to a censor in New York and now resided at
the New York Public Library. Also examined was a video transfer ofthe copy held by Gosfilmofond in Moscow—an English-language
version with German subtitles that the experts hoped might include
missing scenes. It did not, however, have any new material in it. Staff
was also able to locate the sound track on Vitaphone-style discs
owned by a private collector who was willing to lend them.29 Listed
in order of footage used, the Library used (1) the original picture andtrack negatives from the Library of Congress in the Universal Collection; (2) the incomplete studio print, also in the Universal Collection;(3) an incomplete Canadian print owned by the Museum of Modern
Art; (4) Vitaphone-style sound disks owned by the late David Goldenberg; (5) the National Archives of Canada archival negative; (6) thearchival picture negative owned by Janus; and (7) a pre-World War II
16-mm print owned by Douris Films and housed in the Rohauer Collection.
By September 2001, the Library of Congress had produced a
copy of The Emperor Jones that experts believe to be approximately 3
29 According to Annette Melville, the existence of these sound discs at such a latedate is unusual and may indicate that the film was shown in small towns that did
not yet have new sound systems.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

minutes shorter than the original 80-minute film. Some elements ofthe film were still missing or had badly deteriorated. To get the filmin sync with the sound track and to restore damaged frames, lab
technicians doubled some frames and held others in freeze frame.
The sound track was a complete version of that of the original general release.
The costs of this kind of preservation and restoration work, if
done at a commercial facility, would be $35,000 or more for the film
portion alone. Sound work could cost another $10,000 or more. Thesefigures do not include the costs of research and staff time. Like rarebook conservation, film restoration is a high-investment solution for
an artifact of special value that is deemed to be endangered. It is nota treatment that all films need to or should receive. Like works on
paper and recorded sound, moving image materials require degrees
of discrimination among objects and the treatment—passive care or
active intervention—that should be used. There is always a balancing act between the items perceived to have high intellectual or cultural value at a specific time, the fragility of the physical item, andthe funds and other resources available to treat them. It is fair to say
that, as part of a larger national initiative to fund film preservation
and restoration, The Emperor Jones was one of several works that received treatment because the funds became available.

4.3 Preserving Oral Traditions
Although the technology for recording sound is scarcely 100 years
old, it has radically transformed the ways in which societies communicate, create art, document their lives, and fill idle time and empty
rooms. It has also spawned large and lucrative industries that recordand disseminate music, spoken word, and ambient sounds, and has
introduced undreamed-of complexities into a copyright regime thatwas designed to manage rights for textual materials. Nearly every
aspect of sound preservation is affected by these transformations:what to preserve, how to preserve it, how to negotiate and manage
complex rights issues, and how to make recorded sound accessible
into the future. Even for materials that are not commercially produced and distributed and that are, in essence, unpublished, rights
and access issues can have a powerful inhibiting force on preservation. There is no better example of the challenges of sound preservation than that presented by recorded folklore.
The technical problems of preserving sound that is recorded on
fragile media such as wax cylinders or cassette tapes, dependent asthey are upon playback equipment that is quickly made obsolete by
emerging technologies, may appear at first blush to be the chief obstacle to preservation and access. This is far from true. Future accessto folklore resources will be equally dependent on the two other legsof the three-legged stool of access: (1) how materials are organizedand described or cataloged for easy retrieval; and (2) whether or notpresent and future users will have legal or ethical rights to look at,cite, or reproduce the original sources. Given the challenge of physi-

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cal preservation, few libraries and archives are willing to invest inpreserving collections that are uncataloged or not cleared for research or educational uses. Most recorded folklore materials are technically unpublished, just as are radio broadcasts, televisionsoundtracks, interviews, and recordings of live dramatic and musicalperformances.30 This means that the folklore materials are seldom
well indexed (indexing being an investment in inventory control thatcommercial firms must make to manage distribution, but which
many documenters will not do systematically). There are equally
parlous problems with intellectual and moral rights: a clear audit
trail of written informed consent seldom accompanies folk recordings, and the rights of both the documenters and the documented areoften contested under those circumstances.
The American Folklore Society (AFS) and the American Folklife
Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress recently convened a group
to identify the barriers to preserving audio folklore collections and todevelop strategies for overcoming those barriers. Academic specialists and curators were concerned about decaying physical collections, which they saw as primarily technical. “These were the familiar challenges of media degradation and format obsolescence thathave eluded effective remediation for at least a generation. To capture living traditions on documentary media, field workers havebeen using a variety of media formats, none of which is favorable forlong-term preservation and each of which has presented new problems of storage, longevity, and hardware dependencies” (CLIR 2001).
These media include wax cylinders; wire recordings; aluminum,shellac, and vinyl discs; glass and acetate masters; digital audiotape(DAT) tape; and cassette tape. Audiotape lasts for 10 to 60 years. But
how can one tell exactly how long it will last, and what can one do toslow the inevitable loss?
The AFS and AFC invited technologists, preservation experts,
lawyers, and members of various folk communities to discuss theissues and provide guides to best practices. The answers that thetechnologists gave to questions about stable media were discouraging: From the technical point of view, they said, there will never be astable recording medium. Sound recordings must be periodicallycopied onto newer and, one hopes, more stable, media. We must
learn to manage and migrate collections regularly, and to live withimpermanence.
What is the format favored for future preservation? Whatever it
is, it cannot be analog. The experts acknowledged that analog soundrecordings have the highest fidelity. The problem with analog is thatthe media on which the sounds are recorded degrade. The sounds
must be frequently copied onto other media, and with every instanceof copying, some information is permanently lost. For preservation,
the highest-quality medium for reformatting has been quarter-inch
analog magnetic tape on open 10-inch reels. This has been the stan30 “It is in these recordings in which rights issues are the most complex and inneed of study, and perhaps adaptation, as they relate to preservation” (Brylawski
2001, 2).

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

dard for nearly half a century. But these tapes do not last as long as
do the underlying sources, such as vinyl long-playing (LP) records.
Even worse, only two firms manufacture this analog tape, and its
production is not considered a growth industry. The advantage ofdigital recording is that there is no loss of information. The disadvantage is the need for compression, which diminishes the sound quality. Even with the relatively high fidelity that can be achieved withdigital media, compact discs (CDs) will need reformatting and migration in the not-too-distant future.
Reformatting fragile media will require a process of ongoing assessment and triage to identify materials in need of treatment. This
process will be successful only to the extent that collections anditems in them are well organized and well described. While the immediate future will see management and migration of recorded
sound from fragile media onto more stable media, this will be donein the knowledge that even the more stable media are not permanent. Under these circumstances, the best strategy is to develop arisk-management plan that takes into account the end purposes ofpreservation. By assessing future access demands, we can make informed decisions not only about what the medium or carrier needs
to achieve stabilization but also about future users and their needs.
Projecting the access needs of future users is a crucial part of any
preservation strategy. One cannot afford to wait and see what will bedeemed valuable 25 to 50 years hence. In preserving folk heritage
collections, we can judge future needs only by the present generationof scholars, researchers, and the documented communities themselves who need access to the materials.
One of the key findings of the survey of collections undertakenby the AFS and AFC is that much of what has been recorded is poorly controlled, badly labeled, and lacking critical documentation
about rights to use. This situation exists in part because of the changing mores of professions such as anthropology, ethnomusicology,
and folklore, which, decades ago, did not understand the importanceof securing written or recorded informed consent from the peoples
whom they were recording. There is no consensus on how to remediate this problem with retrospective collections; however, it is clearthat scholars and field workers of the present and future must document fully the conditions under which their subjects grant access.
As with other academic disciplines, those of folklore, anthropology, and ethnomusicology are looking to the time when they mightfind both primary and secondary sources online. One of the major
barriers is that the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology do nothave standardized vocabularies for many common terms. This hinders the development of cataloging and indexing schemes for inventory control, not to mention searching across collections. It is criticalthat a thesaurus of terms be agreed upon, and work is currently being done on this. Issues of rights, vexing enough to sort through inthe controlled environment of the reading room, become even more
complex in the digital realm. Many people are calling for open andvirtually unrestricted access on the Web to indigenous music and

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folklore. Others urge that the oral traditions of various communities
be controlled fully by those communities, even if that means banning
access for research purposes by those who are not members of thesecommunities. This has become a particularly heated issue amongsome Native American nations. In the meantime, there is a need toassess what individuals and institutions have on their shelves, what
condition the materials are in, and how quickly these recordings
must be reformatted to ensure that they are preserved.

4.4 JSTOR: Online Access and Digital Archiving
JSTOR, a nonprofit journal-archiving project, has made available online to libraries the back files of 153 titles from 17 academic disciplines, a collection that, as of November 2001, exceeded 8 million
pages. More than 1,100 libraries from 53 countries participate in thiscollaborative enterprise. Approximately 180 colleges and universities
have had access to the database since early 1997. In the first six
months of 2001, more than 2.7 million articles were printed from its
database, more than 5.7 million searches were performed, and the
database had more than 22 million user access sessions (JSTORNEWS 2001).
The original intent of JSTOR was to reduce storage costs for lowuse back journals in the humanities and social sciences and to easeaccess to journal content. While there is some evidence that academic
libraries that use JSTOR are now either removing duplicate copies
from their shelves or moving copies from the central library stacks to
the more cost-effective shelving of remote storage, the chief benefit ofJSTOR to date has not been for preservation. It has been to increase
access to retrospective secondary literature and to dramaticallychange how these materials are used. Lexicologists and referencecompilers are mining JSTOR, as they have mined the Making ofAmerica database. Fred Shapiro, compiler of the forthcoming Yale
Dictionary of Quotations, has been using JSTOR to track down attributions for such quotable saws as “There is no such thing as a freelunch,” and to determine that many such sayings have been incorrectly attributed for years by authoritative sources such as Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations (Hafner 2001). (It was not Milton Friedman who
first said this in 1975, but Alvin Hanssen in a 1952 Ethics article.) Others have been using the JSTOR database to pinpoint more precisely
instances of first use of certain words (Science 2001).
It appears that the electronic articles in JSTOR are being used
more frequently than are those in paper form. JSTOR studied the useof back hard-copy and electronic articles to compare access. There
were a total of 692 uses of 10 hard-copy journals at five test sites overthe course of the three-month survey in 1996. A study of the use of
the same journals in JSTOR at the same five sites for the last threemonths of 1999 yielded more than 7,700 article views. In addition,although there is presumably substantial overlap in articles viewed
and those printed, 4,885 articles were printed, bringing the total ofarticles viewed and printed during the study to 12,581. When thisReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

figure is compared with the 692 uses in the 1996 survey, it would
seem that electronic access is greatly increasing use of the material.
Interdisciplinary use of the journals has also risen—a trend that has
not been documented in hard-copy use. Further evidence shows thatolder articles in certain disciplines do not lose their value; for example, in the field of economics, the average age of the 10 most frequently retrieved articles was 13 years; in mathematics, it was 32
years. This is beginning to raise questions about what constitutes research or pedagogical value in journal literature and about the relationship between citation frequency and that value. The articles thatare viewed most frequently are not the same as those that are mostfrequently cited; in fact, frequently viewed articles may be rarely cited (Guthrie 2000).
JSTOR was designed to solve both preservation problems andaccess problems. Its goal is to become a repository in which subscribers will eventually develop so much faith that they will relinquish
many of their old and unused journals. It is not intended to spur athoughtless disposal of journals, but rather to shift the burden of retaining low-use materials to those institutions that have taken on therole of “libraries of last resort.” JSTOR has reached agreement with
the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) to become the first North
American repository of copies of every issue of every journal in its
database. JSTOR intends to create several such repositories of hardcopy journals over time, in the belief that distributed artifactual repositories best serve the preservation needs of the research community through redundancy. Such repositories would also provide
access to originals on demand. Many of JSTOR’s advocates believethat a few full runs of journals centrally located in a few repositories
are more useful than are a plethora of incomplete runs widely dispersed. In its work with libraries, JSTOR has often had difficulty inassembling complete runs of journals. This reveals how challenging
it has been even for those libraries that try to be comprehensive intheir coverage of one discipline or another (JSTOR 2001).
A number of economic issues may affect the further development of JSTOR and of its now-developing art image counterpart,
ArtSTOR. These issues go to the heart of the promise of networked
resources: to reduce costs resulting from unnecessary redundancies
or, looked at in another way, to avoid future costs that libraries
would incur if they continued to develop collections individually. As
libraries’ print collections grow, managers are forced to make decisions about where to store them: in the centrally located librarystacks on campus or in the more flexible, preservation-friendly environments of offsite, high-density storage. They face two alternatives:(1) keeping a full retrospective collection onsite but not in all subjects
and sending a great number of subjects off-campus; and (2) creating
a more equitable burden among disciplines by finding the lowest-use
items within a classification and sending them offsite. JSTOR statistics reveal that in some fields, the distinction in value or use between
older and more recent literature is not meaningful, and using dates

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The Evidence in Handof publication to predict demand may unintentionally create problems.
JSTOR has attempted to find out what it costs libraries to store
back files of journals. One source has estimated that it costs a libraryan average of $175,000, based on what it would cost to build thatstorage today (Bowen 2001). Although this figure is derived from amethodology widely used in library science, it can be misleading because it is really about avoiding building in the future, not savingson current expectations. The costs of doing business in a research library are hard to calculate, since benefits are difficult to quantify.
Nonetheless, the cost of housing journals onsite versus offsite can beclearly assessed. A survey that JSTOR conducted in 1999 revealed
that 20 percent of respondents already had some journals in remotestorage and that 24 percent of respondents indicated that they hadplans to move more items offsite (Bowen 2001). Some libraries, especially small college libraries that are committed to serving the needsof teaching first and research second, have never had a policy of
keeping journals forever. They are finding that they can gain accessto older literature through JSTOR that they would have otherwise
had to obtain through interlibrary loan. For libraries of last resort, as
well as those attached to research institutions, the trade-offs between
storage (onsite or offsite) and deaccessioning may differ and be harder to quantify. Few, if any, ARL libraries are divesting themselves ofold hard copies, even the third of fourth copy, of a journal title theyhold. For them, the key advantage of participation in JSTOR to dateis improved delivery of resources to patrons. These libraries are notlooking to eliminate storage costs at present. With JSTOR, however,they can send the second, third, or fourth copy to offsite storage withless concern about compromising ease of access. They are also able toprovide access to journals with a convenience that would not otherwise have been possible. JSTOR has done something that no single
library would have done on its own behalf: it has been willing to run
the copyright gauntlet with publishers and arrive at an access policythat suits the needs of both publishers and researchers. ArtSTOR isaiming to accomplish the same thing with its database of art historical images.

4.5 The Rossetti Archive: Collecting and Preserving theBorn-digital Scholarly Publication
The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive (the Rossetti Archive) is a comprehensive electronic edition produced and updated continually since 1993 by Jerome McGann and more than 30 others working under his
direction.31 The current version, published by the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH)
using Enigma’s Dynaweb software, is the first of four projected in31 John Unsworth, director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities at the University of Virginia, contributed this case study.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

stallments. It includes 10,388 SGML and JPEG files, presenting material that centers on the 1870 volume of Rossetti’s Poems and outlining
the structure that the completed archive will require. This material ismarked up in a Document Type Definition (DTD) developed for the
project at IATH—the Rossetti Archive Master Document Type Definition (RAM DTD). In addition, there are about 5,000 (offline) TIFF
images, from which the JPEGs are derived; some HTML pages withintroductory, summary, and navigational materials; and perhaps twodozen style sheets. The publication also includes 18 essays about thearchive, by McGann and others, marked up in HTML and available
from the “Resources” area of the archive. The completed Rossetti Archive is likely to contain 25,000 files and to take another 10 to 12
years (and another 30 or 40 people) to finish. The University of Virginia, private foundations, and corporations have already invested
hundreds of thousands of dollars in developing this resource; perhaps as much as a million dollars will be invested by the time theproject ends.
The Rossetti Archive is a valuable scholarly publication, not onlyin terms of the effort and money invested but also in terms of therole it has played in the migration of humanities scholarship online,in the pioneering of electronic scholarly editions, and in the historyof humanities computing. For these reasons, it is worth collecting
and preserving in a research library. To date, however, digital libraryefforts have focused on library-based production of library-owned
digital primary resources. Libraries have not yet had to deal withsecond-generation digital library problems, where the focus is on
scholarly analysis, reprocessing, and creation of digital primary resources.
In January 2000, IATH and The University of Virginia Library’s
Digital Library Research and Development group (DLR&D) began athree-year project, “Supporting Digital Scholarship” (SDS), to investigate the problem that the Rossetti Archive and other originally digital scholarly publications pose to research libraries. Funded by The
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and codirected by IATH Director
John Unsworth and DLR&D Director Thornton Staples, SDS aims toaddress second-generation digital library problems. This project is
examining three digital library problems:• scholarly use of digital primary resources• library adoption of originally digital scholarly research• co-creation of digital resources by scholars, publishers, and libraries
Approaching these problems requires developing technicalmethods and institutional policies for collecting originally digitalscholarly publications. Accordingly, SDS has formed two working
committees—one on technical issues and one on policy issues. The
technical committee is responsible for production and implementation of the software, standards, and systems that this project requires.
The goal of the technical committee is to build the systems that showwhat can and cannot be done, at a technical level, to support digitalscholarship. The policy committee is charged with considering and

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proposing policies governing long-term preservation and access for
digital materials in the library and policies covering the integration,dissemination, and reuse of those materials. The goal of the policy
committee is to produce guidelines for collecting digital scholarshipthat outline what libraries can and cannot promise to do with thesematerials, depending on what form they take, what standards they
do or do not adhere to, what functionality they have, and how they
achieve it.
Technical work in this project takes place within a digital libraryarchitecture called FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture). FEDORA originated at Cornell University inresearch done by Carl Lagoze and others; the Virginia implementation is FEDORA’s largest testbed to date and its first real-world installation. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded an extension of this research that will involve beta-test installations of
FEDORA in a half-dozen research libraries in the United States andthe United Kingdom.32 In Virginia’s implementation of FEDORA,
objects within a digital library or repository consist of a basis (e.g., a
JPEG image in a simple object, or a machine-readable text with page
images, in a complex object), plus three metadata packages (administrative, technical, and descriptive). Finally, objects can be associatedwith one or more “disseminators”—data structures that pair a particular set of behaviors, or “signatures,” with methods to produce thatbehavior (in the current IATH implementation, servlets).
In October 2001, the Rossetti Archive was first collected into FEDORA as a set of XML documents with XSL style sheets that mimic
the functionality of the Dynaweb publication. To accomplish this, the
SGML DTD had to be modified so that it was capable of validating
SGML and XML. James Clark’s SX was used to generate the XML,and mark-up in the documents themselves had to be adjusted to disambiguate some forms of references to other documents on which
navigation and selection would depend. Entity declarations, held
separately in a catalog file in the original SGML version, had to be
distributed into the files that contained the relevant entity references.
This task required the efforts of several staff members, working parttime, over several months—far beyond the effort that a librarywould be willing to devote to collect a single publication under normal circumstances, but far less time than has gone into creating theRossetti Archive. The point of this experiment is not to demonstrate acost-effective collection strategy but to develop an understanding ofwhat characteristics an originally digital publication should have inorder to be collectable at reasonable cost. Any such publication will
have a better chance of being converted to a collectable form if it ishighly structured, even if its form is idiosyncratic.
The publication’s basic content—its textual information, image
data and, perhaps most important from an editorial point of view,
the profusion of relationships among the texts and images that makeup the archive—is part of a library collection. It has been collected in
32 Virginia’s FEDORA implementation is outlined in Staples and Wayland 2000.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

a way that should make it possible to migrate the data forward as
mark-up standards, delivery mechanisms, browsers, and other elements of the digital library environment continue to develop.
Work remains to be done. The objects in the Rossetti Archive require administrative, technical, and descriptive metadata, and it isunclear how much of these metadata can be shared, how much canbe automatically harvested from the existing data, and how much
will have to be created by hand. There are some unsolved problems,
too. Searching is one of the most difficult technical problems, because
so much basic navigation (in the Rossetti Archive, but also in many
SGML- or XML-based document structures) is predicated on queries,
and because, until recently, there has been no standards-based way
of expressing such queries. That problem may be solved for the Rossetti Archive by Tamino, a commercial XML database product that
implements the full XPath standard and promises to implement
XQuery, as soon as that standard is approved. If this works as advertised, there will be no part of the Rossetti Archive that cannot be expressed in a completely software- and hardware-independent way.
In principle, therefore, all of its informational content or functionality
will be fungible across future changes in technology.
That optimistic assessment should not obscure the difficulties
that might attend the collection of a different sort of originally digitalscholarly publication. For example, if the relationships in the Rossetti
Archive had been embodied in a relational database, rather than in
an XML structure, there would be no standards-based way to express
them. Consequently, this important aspect of the publication could
be expressed only in a software-dependent way. This would make itmuch more difficult, perhaps impossible, for a collecting library to
make commitment to maintain, migrate, preserve, and access thematerials over time.
If scholars are to produce originally digital publications that arecompatible with libraries’ needs and that allow libraries to collect atreasonable costs, then best practices for authoring have to be understood, established, and supported in some kind of networked, institutionalized work space. Publishers should ultimately support thisworkspace, though it may need to be designed and developed, initially, by libraries themselves. Prototyping such a workspace will occupy the second half of the SDS project.

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5. Summary And Recommendations

I

learn with great satisfaction that you are about committing to
the press the valuable historical and State papers you havebeen so long collecting. Time and accident are committing
daily havoc on the originals deposited in our public offices. The
late war has done the work of centuries in this business. The lastcannot be recovered, but let us save what remains; not by vaults
and locks which fence them from the public eye and use inconsigning them to the waste of time, but by such amultiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach ofaccident (Jefferson [1791] 1984).

Thomas Jefferson, often credited with having foreseen the problems his compatriots would face and devising solutions to them,seems in this letter to be typically prophetic in his vision. Is he notdescribing “preservation through proliferation”—the key preservation strategy that libraries adopted in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies and that has resulted in the great abundance of resources inlibraries? Is not “multiplication of copies,” as Jefferson puts it, theway that films and music and photographs have spread through ourculture, with demand for preservation following? Is not copying
them, be it by photocopying or scanning, and placing them beyond
the reach of accident a recipe for avoiding the “daily havoc on theoriginals”? And, as we look ahead, will these remain the primarystrategies for ensuring future access to present-day originals, orshould we anticipate major changes in the nature of research, teaching, and preservation-and-access technologies that will render thesestrategies obsolete?
Core principles of artifactual value do not change with genre—
map versus manuscript versus musical performance. The value of an
artifact, however, is profoundly affected by the medium on which
the information is fixed. The definition of artifact as a unique item ofReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

historical importance worked as long as there was a fair degree ofconsensus regarding the nature of the artifact. New recording techniques for sound and image, as well as magnetic and electronic reproduction, have put enormous pressure on these heretofore-useful
assumptions. This is true even in the case of traditional print/paper
artifacts, as has been seen.
Artifacts are complex objects—materially, structurally, temporally, and perceptually. Cultural forces shape this complexity in an ongoing dialectic that is subject to continual revision and thus is neverdefinitive. The status of any given artifact, like that of any cultural
construction, is vulnerable for several reasons. In a museum or a library that has limited economic resources for core mission work, it
must compete to maintain a claim on institutional resources. It mustalso compete for intellectual resources—for the attention of the public, of scholars, and of others who, by their attention or lack thereof,
valorize its status. This intellectual competition is every bit as parlous as is the economic one. Each generation must engage the issue
on its own terms and do so actively if preservation is to be effective.
Today, thanks to the very technologies that highlight, if not create, the problems we are facing, we can coordinate efforts to document and preserve in ways hitherto impossible. We should be able to
track more clearly what others are doing in identifying what must be
saved and what need not. We should be able to coordinate retentionof best surviving copies and thereby avoid duplicating preservation
efforts. We should be able to know with certainty what “last, best”
copies of an artifact exist and where they exist, and therefore to assign responsibility for stewardship of such items.
This work is traditionally seen as the purview of librarians andarchivists; however, preservation strategies at the local and national
levels have been and will continue to be dependent for their successon the engagement of all members of the research community, including scholars and academic officers. Scholars may not see preservation of research collections as their responsibility, but until they do,there is a risk that many valuable research sources will not be preserved. Faculty can work with local librarians to ensure that scholars’
research needs are clearly articulated and are taken into consideration when budgets are planned. Faculty can be influential in persuading presidents and provosts to devote appropriate levels of resources to locally held research collections. Above all, they can seethat part of their role as scholars is to be stewards of collections asshared resources across the country. This means engaging at the national as well as local level to ensure that scarce but valuable resources are being preserved at some locations. They can engage their national roles as stewards through their scholarly societies, which act as
publishers and guardians of the scholarly record. They can, throughnational organizations, articulate the value of the intellectual heritage that is at risk and lobby for increased funding to support preservation.

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5.1 Principles of Good StewardshipGood stewardship begins with scholars and librarians taking responsibility for the preservation of artifacts in the following ways:• Scholars can work with librarians in identifying materials to preserve, focusing first on those resources that are most endangered.
• Scholars can identify and define categories of resources and workwith librarians to locate the finest and best-preserved specimens.
• Scholars and librarians can collaborate to develop realistic policies
for retention and disposition.
• Librarians can work together to develop responsibilities for collections of last resort, including aggregating collections into regional
repositories.
• Librarians can work together to refine existing bibliographic andcollection records to make it possible for researchers to locate
these preserved artifacts.
• Scholars and librarians can develop and nurture local, regional,
and national collaborations that are sustainable and that balance
the needs of present and future users.

5.2 Best Practices for Preservation of the Artifact
At the technical level, good stewardship rests on the following principles and practices:• preventive care
• global treatment of collections, when available, for cost-effectiveness• use of item-level treatment for items of special value and vulnerability• special handling and security protocols• surrogacy to prevent damage and extend access• optimal storage facilities• networks of repositories and remote storage facilities• careful documentation of problems• constant assessment of progress in key programs and sharing ofdata about them
• documentation of preservation treatments (e.g., deacidification,
reformatting) on bibliographical records

5.3 Strategies for Specific Formats
As part of the network of libraries responsible for preserving andmaking accessible artifactual collections, individual libraries can playa critical role in a national preservation strategy by doing the following:
Print (pp. 19-30)• identifying which genres and what types of printed materials
need to be preserved• using the most appropriate and cost-effective means (e.g., deacidification, reformatting, rebinding, repair) to ensure long-term accessReport of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections• giving priority to the preservation of materials uniquely held at
local institutions or generally rare
Audiovisual (pp. 30-41)• assessing collection needs to set priorities for reformatting andother treatments• stabilizing materials on paper (e.g., engravings, posters, and photographs on acid paper)• reformatting materials onto stable media before information is lost• saving original source materials (e.g., negatives)• documenting preservation treatments on common databases andcoordinating preservation treatments to avoid duplication
Digital (pp. 41-54)• developing sound digitization selection criteria• ensuring preservation treatment of underlying source materials• creating registries of digitized collections• defining what types of digital objects (e.g., electronic journals,
Web sites) should be preserved and by whom
• lowering barriers to fair use of digital information• creating digital resources and retrieval systems in nonproprietarysystems• developing best practices for migration• exploring the possibilities of emulation

5.4 Recommendations
At the local and national levels, there are several actions that members of the research community can take to ensure greater access tooriginal research materials in the future and to use available resources most effectively. Such actions include the following:• Advocate for the development of regional repositories of artifactual collections that reduce duplication of effort, create economies ofscale, and ensure that the greatest number of unique or scarce priority items are preserved and made accessible to researchers. Suchrepositories might be organized along chronological lines, withinstitutions specializing in certain periods; along disciplinary or
linguistic lines; or along geographical (i.e., physical location) lines
for consortial use.
• Advocate for the creation of a repository of record for American
imprints that operates at the national level to ensure that at least
one copy of materials deposited for copyright will endure.
• Create standardized descriptive practices that make information
about resources readily accessible through searchable databases.
This is especially critical for academic fields that lack best practices and controlled vocabularies in documentation and retrieval.
• Raise awareness of the importance of preservation with the expectation that foundations, federal agencies, and others will increase
their financial commitment to it.

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• Increase the funds devoted to preservation by gaining a larger
commitment from host institutions, raising endowment funds,
and securing grants from government agencies and foundations.
• Invest resources in the development of more effective and economical preservation processes.

5.5 Areas for Further Research
The research agenda that has emerged from this investigation into
the role of the artifact in library collections is considerable for each of
the three types of recording media discussed: print, analog audiovisual, and digital. The most pressing areas, largely nontechnical, include determining what materials are held in libraries and archives,
identifying how researchers use source materials, and encouraging
the use of primary sources and artifactual collections in research andteaching. In particular, there is a need to• develop and apply methodologies to track the growing online useof large digitized collections• gather and study data on the behavior of researchers online sothat the tool kit developed for researchers’ use will meet theirneeds• gather data on the state of artifacts in nonacademic libraries andrepositories• research and develop curricular needs for the use of original
sources• increase media longevity studies and extend them to all new media, including digital
The task force also recommends that a similar investigation beundertaken into the state of preservation among rare and special collections. While excluded from consideration in this study, these collections are as vulnerable to unintended loss and destruction as are
the artifactual and digital collections that have been the subject of
this report.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

6. References

Web site addresses were valid
as of November 1, 2001

Association of Research Libraries. 2000. Holdings of University Research Libraries in U. S. and Canada. The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 19: A23.
Association of Research Libraries. 1999a. Association of Research Libraries Data Tables 1998–1999. Available at http://www.arl.org/
stats/arlstat/mrstat.html.
Association of Research Libraries. 1999b. Association of Research Libraries Newsletter 206 (October). Special Issue on Global Resources.
Ayers, Edward L., et al. 2001. The Valley of the Shadow. Available at
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/vshadow2/.
Baker, Nicholson. 2000. Deadline: A Desperate Plea to Stop the Trashing of America’s Historic Newspapers. The New Yorker July 24: 42-61.
Baker, Nicholson. 2001. Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.
New York: Random House.
Bearman, David. 1999. Reality and Chimeras in the Preservation ofElectronic Records. D-Lib Magazine 5 (4). Available at http://
www.dlib.org/dlib/april99/bearman/04bearman.html.
Bearman, David, and Jennifer Trant. 1998. Authenticity of Digital Resources: Towards a Statement of Requirements in the Research Process. D-Lib Magazine (June). Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/
june98/06bearman.html.

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Big 12. 1998. Scholarly Communication and the Need for Collective
Action: A Statement by the Chief Academic Officers of the Big 12.
Press release, August 7. Available at http://www.big12plus.org/
pressreleases/scholar.htm.
Bouché, Nicole. 1999. Digitization for Scholarly Use: The Boswell Papers
at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Washington, D.C.:
Council on Library and Information Resources. Available at
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub81-bouche/pub81text.html.
Bowen, William G. 2001. At a Slight Angle to the Universe: The University in a Digitized, Commercialized Age. The Romanes Lecturefor 2000, delivered at the University of Oxford, October 17, 2000. ARL
Newsletter 216 (June): 1–15.
Branin, Joseph, Frances Groen, and Suzanne Thorin. 2000. The
Changing Nature of Collection Management in Research Libraries.
Available at http://www.arl.org/collect/changing.htm.
Bridegam, Willis E. 2001. A Collaborative Approach to Collection Storage:
The Five-College Depository Library. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources.
Brockman, William S., et al. 2001 forthcoming. Scholarly Work in the
Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment. Washington,
D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources.
Brylawski, Samuel. 2001. Preservation of Digitally Recorded Sound.
Unpublished report for the Library of Congress.
Chapman, Stephen, Paul Conway, and Anne Kenney. 1999. Digital
Imaging and Preservation Microfilm: The Future of the Hybrid Approachfor the Preservation of Brittle Books. Unpublished report. Washington,
D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources. Available at
http://www.clir.org/pubs/archives/hybridintro.html#full.
Commission on Preservation and Access. 1997. Canadian Research
on Permanent Paper Answers Old Questions and Raises New Concerns. The Commission on Preservation and Access Newsletter 104 (NovDec): 2.
Conway, Paul. 2000. Overview: Rationale for Digitization and Preservation, in Handbook for Digital Projects: A Management Tool for Preservation and Access, edited by Maxine K. Sitts. Andover, Mass.: Northeast
Document Conservation Center.
Conway, Paul. 1996. Preservation in the Digital World. Washington,
D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access. Available at http://
www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub62.html.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

Council on Library and Information Resources. 2001. Folk Heritage
Collections in Crisis. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources. Available at http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/
pub96/contents.html.
Council on Library and Information Resources. 2000. Authenticity in a
Digital Environment. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources. Available at http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/
pub92/contents.html.
Cox, Richard J. 2000. The Great Newspaper Caper: Backlash in the
Digital Age. First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet 5(12).
Available at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue 5_12/cox/
index.html.
Digital Library Federation. 2001a. Digital Library Standards andPractices: Benchmarking Digital Reproductions of Printed Books andSerials. Available at http://www.diglib.org/standards.htm.
Digital Library Federation. 2001b. Registry of Digital Reproductionsof Paper-based Books and Serials. Available at http://
www.diglib.org/collections/reg/reg.htm.
Digital Library Federation. 2001c. Preservation of Electronic Scholarly Journals. Available at http://www.diglib.org/preserve/
presjour.htm.
Foucault, Michel. 1997. What Is an Author? Translated by Donald F.
Bouchard and Sherry Simons. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,edited by Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press.
George, Gerald. 1995. Difficult Choices: How Can Scholars Help Save
Endangered Research Resources? A Report to the Commission on Preservation and Access. Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation andAccess.
Gertz, Janet. 1999. Is Digital Conversion Really Part of Preservation?
Abbey Newsletter 23(2): 22.
Granger, Stewart. 2000. Emulation as a Digital Preservation Strategy.
D-Lib Magazine 6(10). Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/granger/10granger.html.
Greenstein, Daniel I. 2001. The Registry’s Return. CLIR Issues 19:5.
Available at http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues19.html#registry.
Guthrie, Kevin. 2000. Revitalizing Older Published Literature: Preliminary Lessons from the Use of JSTOR. Paper presented at the Economics and Usage of Digital Library Collections Conference, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 23, 2000.

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Hafner, Katie. 2001. A New Way of Verifying Old and Familiar Sayings. The New York Times (Feb. 1): E8.
Hayes, Robert M. 1985. Analysis of the Magnitude, Costs, and Benefits of the Preservation of Research Library Books. Working paper
prepared for the Council on Library Resources.
Jana, Reena. 2001. The Guggenheim’s New Legacy System. Digital
Art Preservation. Wired (October): 64.
Jefferson, Thomas. [1791] 1984. Thomas Jefferson to Ebenezer Hazard, Philadelphia, February 18, 1791. In Thomas Jefferson: Writings:
Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Public and Private Papers,
Addresses, Letters, edited by Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Library ofAmerica.
Jewell, Timothy D. 2001. Selection and Presentation of Commercially
Available Electronic Resources: Issues and Practices. Washington, D.C.:
Council on Library and Information Resources.
JSTORNEWS. 2001. Available at http://www.jstor.org/news/
2001.06/june2001.pdf.
JSTOR. 2001. Available at http://www.jstor.org/about/issues/
index.html.
Kantor, Paul B. 1986. Costs of Preservation Microfilming at Research Libraries: A Study of Four Institutions. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library Resources.
Kenney, Anne R. 1996. The Disposition of Archival Source Documents After Digital Imaging. Janus 2: 78-86.
Library of Congress. 2001. How Does the Library Acquire its Holdings? Frequently Asked Questions. Available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/faq/25faq.html#5.
Library of Congress. 1997. Television and Video Preservation 1997: A
Study of the Current State of American Television and Video Preservation.
Vol. 1. Report of the Librarian of Congress. Written by William T.
Murphy. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. Available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/film/tvstudy.html.
Library of Congress. 1994. Redefining Film Preservation: A National
Plan. Recommendations of the Librarian of Congress in Consultation
with the National Film Preservation Board. Coordinated by Annette
Melville and Scott Simmon. Washington, D.C.: National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. Available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/film.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

Lyman, Peter, and Hal R. Varian. 2000. How Much Information?
Available at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/.
Lyman, Peter, and Brewster Kahle. 1998. Archiving Digital Cultural
Artifacts: Organizing an Agenda for Action. D-Lib Magazine. Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/07lyman.html.
Lynch, Clifford. 1999. Canonicalization: A Fundamental Tool to Facilitate Preservation and Management of Digital Information.
D-Lib Magazine 5(9). Available at
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september99/09lynch.html.
MacQueen, Scott. 1990. Rise and Fall of The Emperor Jones, 1933.
American Cinematographer (February): 34-40.
Marley, S. Branson, Jr. 1975. Newspapers and the Library of Congress. Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 32 (July): 207-237.
Menne-Haritz, Angelika, and Nils Brübach. 1999. The Intrinsic Valueof Archive and Library Material. Digitale Texte der Archivschule Marburg (5). Available at http://www.uni-marburg.de/archivschule/intrinsengl.html.
Modern Language Association. 1996. Statement of the Significance ofPrimary Records. Report of the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of the Print Record (1993–1995). Profession 95: 27-50.
Molyneux, Robert E. 1998. The Gerould Statistics 1907/08–1961/62.
Available at http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/gerould/.
National Archives and Records Service. 1982. Intrinsic Value in Archival Material. Staff Information Paper 21. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Service and General Services Administration.
Panitch, Judith M. 2001. Special Collections in ARL Libraries; Results of
the 1998 Survey Sponsored by the ARL Research Collections Committee.
Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries.
Reed-Scott, Jutta. 1999. Preserving Research Collections: A Collaboration
Between Libraries and Scholars. Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries.
RLG DigiNews. 2000. FAQ on Digital Collection Registries. Available
at http://rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-6.html.
Rosenthal, David S. H., and Vicky Reich. 2000. Permanent Web Publishing: LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe). Available at http://
lockss.stanford.edu/freenix2000/freenix2000.html.

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Rothenberg, Jeff. 1999. Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation. Washington, D.C.:
Council on Library and Information Resources.
Rothenberg, Jeff. 1995. Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents.
Scientific American 272(1): 42-7.
Safire, William. 2000. The Way We Live Now: 9-10-00: On Language;
Old Guard. On Language. The New York Times Magazine (Sept. 10): 28.
Science. 2001. You Read It Here First. Science 291 (Jan. 5): 39.
Smith, Geoff. 1995. Access to Newspaper Collections and Content in
a Time of Change. IFLA Journal 21: 282.
Staples, Thornton, and Ross Wayland. 2000. Virginia Dons FEDORA:A Prototype for a Digital Object Repository. D-Lib Magazine 6 (7/8).
Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/staples/
07staples.html.
Storm, William D. 1998. Unified Strategy for the Preservation of Audioand Video Materials. Preservation Research and Testing Series No.
9806. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Preservation Directorate.
Tanselle, G. Thomas. 1998. Literature and Artifacts. Charlottesville Va.:
The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia.
Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information. 1996. Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information. Washington, D.C., and Mountain View, Calif.: Commission on
Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group, Inc.
Available at http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/.
U.S. Census Bureau. 2001. Statistical Abstract of the United States 2000
(120th ed.). Austin, Tex.: Hoover’s Business Press.
U.S. Department of Commerce. 1989. Historical Statistics of the UnitedStates: Colonial Times to 1970. White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International
Publishers.
Walls, David. 2000. Relative Cost for Three Preservation Modes. Abbey Newsletter 24(4): 75.

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Web sites of organizations and projects noted in report

British Universities Film & Video Council. Available at
http://www.bufvc.ac.uk.
Columbia International Affairs Online. Available at http://
www.ciaonet.org/.
Kaypro Emulation. Available at http://www.yoy.org/kaypro/.
National Film Preservation Board. Available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/film.
National Film Preservation Foundation. Available at http://
www.filmpreservation.org.
Rossetti Archive. The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive. Available at http://
www.iath.virginia.edu/rossetti/.

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7. Appendixes

APPENDIX I
Current Library Practices in Collection Development
and Preservation
APPENDIX II
Charge to the Task ForceAPPENDIX III
Selection for Preservation Criteria from RLG, Cornell, and Harvard
APPENDIX IV
Expenditure Trends in ARL Libraries, 1986-2000
APPENDIX V
Non-print Holdings in ARL University Libraries
APPENDIX VI
Comparative Costs for Book Treatments
APPENDIX VII
National Recording Preservation Act of 2000

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

APPENDIX I
Current Library Practices in Collection Development
and Preservation

Libraries have traditionally built local collections to serve local patrons and have acquired material to meet the needs of their communities. For academic libraries, that has meant a focus on resources forteaching and research. Preserving the collections has been synonymous with preserving the information contained in them. Because
libraries acquire physical objects for use and reuse (often under the“first-sale” doctrine of the United States Copyright Code), this has
meant that they own physical property rights to the items on their
shelves. (They rarely own the intellectual property rights.) They thus
are not only preserving information but also preserving institutional
property. While this may appear self-evident, it becomes an important economic consideration when libraries begin collecting materials
too fragile to save for long, such as videotapes, or materials that haveno physical form, such as electronic databases. It also matters greatly
when libraries are urged to preserve resources that are of national
importance but that receive little local use, as was the case in the brittle-books microfilming program of the 1980s and 1990s. When do national priorities trump local ones, especially when the funding is locally based? And how does funding affect preservation selection
priorities?

Building Collections: Libraries and Archives
Research libraries, no matter how large, collect only a small portionof all the information created and disseminated at any given time. In
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most academic libraries
were shaped directly by the research needs of their faculties. This resulted in some very rich veins of bibliographical ore, but it also generally produced holdings that were deep, but not broad, in coverage.
With the growth of all sectors of higher education after WorldWar II, libraries and their collections boomed. Collecting became
somewhat regularized, professionalized, and far more ambitious.
Many libraries at large, research-oriented institutions made concerted efforts to collect in virtually all areas that their academic departments covered. Research collections were critical in recruiting graduate students as well as faculty, and universities scaled up theircollecting activities to provide on-site access to their users.
Libraries selectively acquire currently produced items that will
become the primary documents of tomorrow. To measure how thegrowth in book publishing has made selection more difficult, one has

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only to note the substantial increase in the number of books published in the United States since 1880.
Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (U.S.
Department of Commerce 1989) and the Statistical Abstract of theUnited States (U.S. Census Bureau 2001) give the following annual
output figures for the first year of each decade between 1880 and
1990:
Year
1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990

Books Published
2,076
4,559
6,356
13,4708,422
10,027
11,32811,02215,012
36,071
42,377
46,738

These figures represent only titles produced in the United States.
Research libraries, however, typically acquire titles from countries
around the world. In 1992–1993, the United Kingdom published
86,573 new titles; by 1995–1996, the figure had increased by 24 percent, to 107,263. During the same period, Japan increased its bookproduction 58 percent (from 35,496 to 56,221); Russia, 26 percent(from 28,716 to 36,237); and Italy, 20 percent (from 29,351 to 35,236)(Association of Research Libraries 1999b, 10). A recent analysis of library purchases shows that acquisition of foreign materials is holding steady, but the portion of imprints collected of the total published is declining (Association of Research Libraries 1999b, 10). The
worldwide output is roughly 600,000, of which the average Association of Research Libraries (ARL) library purchases about 50,000.
Most materials in these collections, as well as those in all academic libraries, are text based. The collections are built along disciplinary lines and are created to serve research and teaching needs. It
has fallen to specialized repositories to collect the plethora of information of research value that libraries do not routinely acquire. Suchgroups as historical societies and special libraries (e.g., the American
Antiquarian Society, the Newberry Library) tend to collect in specifictopics (e.g., American history, regional history, travelers’ accounts)and formats (e.g., manuscripts, maps, photographs, musical scores),and to serve as critical supplements to the research libraries on campus. (There are quite a few specialized libraries on campuses aswell.) In contrast to research libraries, many of the specialized repositories collect chiefly primary sources. They are distinguished fromthe book collections of libraries because they are usually unpublished (e.g., manuscripts) or rare (e.g., broadsides); furthermore, only

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

the secondary literature that is germane to those collecting strengths
is acquired. Their collecting policies are shaped by research needs, tothe exclusion of curricular ones.
Despite the recent appropriation of “archive” as a verb to mean
“to store” or “to preserve,” the traditional meaning of archives as anoun is narrower. Archives are institutions that collect records created in the course of an activity—for example, business records or government records. The collection strategies of archives are different
from those of libraries. The National Archives and Records Administration, for example, is charged to collect, organize, and make available the records of the federal government. It collects information
created by the government in the course of its business. This information includes not only paper and electronic records but also films,
photographs, posters, and other visual and sound materials. Archives tend to merge the function of record management and truearchiving for long-term access. They may acquire large caches ofrecords that they will retain for stated periods of time for legal reasons. However, the average archives will accession for permanentretention only 1 to 5 percent of those records. During a process
known as appraisal, they determine which files have historical value,
and they keep only those materials.
Repositories that specialize in non-print materials are often
called archives; however, film and sound archives do not haverecords in the technical sense because they are not documents created in the course of business. Their collections are scaled in an archival way: they are large and often described at the collection level.
These special-format archives—some affiliated with universities,some with museums, some independent—are also a crucial part ofthe information landscape. They must play leading roles in any strategies the task force proposes to ensure the preservation of and accessto artifactual collections.

Shared Access and Shared Collections
Until recently, the only way in which a library could make a publication available to its users was to own it. If demand were great, a library would have to own more than one copy. With the advent ofphotocopying and faxing, together with robust interlibrary loan anddocument-delivery systems, libraries can provide access to an item
without purchasing it. Nevertheless, libraries still have large collections that replicate the collections of other libraries, in part becauseof the constraints of dealing with physically fixed information.
One of the chief advantages of digital technology is its ability tooverleap constraints of time and place and to deliver information at
any time to any computer that is connected to the Internet. Now thatlibraries no longer face the physical and temporal constraints thatexisted before the introduction of electronic networks, the models ofaccess are changing significantly. Libraries understand that students
and scholars prize instant access. Students seek out assigned readings a few hours before they are expected to have read them. Faculty

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members track down bibliographical references under tight deadlines from publishers. As service organizations, libraries assign thephysical locations of their collections on the basis of known patternsof use. The problems associated with keeping collections readily accessible have been highlighted in recent years, as more and more libraries are building offsite storage facilities for low-use materials. As
economically compelling as offsite storage is, it succeeds only whenfaculty members are willing to recognize the time constraints built
into the system (in many cases, a 24-hour wait between requesting
the material and receiving it). But for resources such as journal articles, which can be delivered to the desktop at 3 a.m., how valuable tothe scholar is the physical proximity of the hard copy? How muchshould a library spend to make both easily available? Faced withchoosing between the two, how should the library decide whichtakes priority?
The new delivery technologies—from photocopy to interlibraryloan to digital access—are also having an effect on the substance ofcollection building. Do all libraries need to collect essentially thesame materials, if they can be networked, either virtually or throughinterlibrary loan? Research library collections have been undergoinga certain homogenization, partly because of the spiraling costs ofjournals and partly because of the advent of buying consortia. Libraries have begun to admit that they can no longer aspire to collectcomprehensively, both because of the escalating costs of journals andmonographs and because of the increased quantities of materials.
Between 1986 and 1996, the price of the average journal rose 147 percent, and that of a book by 63 percent. The number of interlibraryloans handled during the same period increased 102 percent. The
access cost increased to an average of $30 per transaction. During thesame period, the consumer price index increased by 41 percent. Citing these statistics, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation said
in a 1998 press release, “We and our colleagues on the faculty mustacknowledge that research universities can no longer afford to build comprehensive collections.” [Emphasis in original]. The committee called
for new efforts of cooperative collecting (Big 12 1998).
The subject of cooperative collection development—the sharingof responsibility for important but low-use materials, many of themin foreign languages—is not new. When library collections first started growing rapidly after World War II, there was an attempt to sharecollecting responsibilities. When this attempt gave out, it was followed by a plan to build a national periodicals center in the 1970s. In
the 1980s, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) developed a method,
based on the Library of Congress classification scheme, that its members could use to inventory collections and determine areas ofstrength. The so-called Conspectus was an instrument that libraries
used for a period of time to learn what others had collected, in partto reduce duplication of effort in certain specialized fields. Individual libraries declared their responsibility for collecting and preserving
literature in areas they chose. During the heyday of filming brittle
books, this inventory system was the basis for many decisions about

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

what each institution would film. The Conspectus fell into desuetudein the 1990s because, among other reasons, libraries were unable tokeep acquisition information current.
These and other attempts to coordinate acquisitions at the national level have failed. There are, however, examples of successful
regional models, one of which is the Triangle Research Libraries Network in North Carolina. Other examples include the Five-College
Depository Library in Massachusetts (see Section 4) and the Center
for Research Libraries.
User studies have repeatedly shown that many volumes in research libraries have extremely low use and or no use at all. A 1979
study of one medium-size research library showed that “any given
book purchased had only slightly better than one chance in two ofever being borrowed. As books on the shelves aged and did not circulate, the chances of their ever circulating diminished to as low as
one in fifty. Journal use, in general, was also discovered to be low”
(Branin, Groen, and Thorin 2000). Given this, how could cooperativecollection efforts fail?
Among the reasons generally cited for the failure of such efforts
are the pressure for each library to serve local needs and its reluctance to cede responsibility in any one area to another library. Moreover, until recently, there were not enough commonly available bibliographical records to make such cooperation workable. Even today,
several ARL libraries have not converted significant portions of theircard catalogs into online records.
The tensions between local and national priorities for acquisition
are mirrored in selecting for preservation. How should libraries manage the conflict between the present needs of researchers and theneeds of future, or even physically distant, users? The challenge is tofind ways to address the needs of local service today with the needsof the future and national priorities in mind. What should be the selection criteria?

Best Practices for Preservation Treatments
The fundamental principles of preservation apply to all formats,from print to digital, but the techniques and costs of the various
treatments differ dramatically. The purpose of library preservation isto ensure the present and future use of information in whatever form
it has been recorded. Library conservation is not like museum conservation, which aims to make an object fit for essentially passiveuse, such as exhibition. Library materials can be heavily used andmust withstand the risk of misuse.
The great bane of libraries and archives is that there are no media on which information has been recorded that do not decay. As
the carrier decays, the information goes with it. The optimal treatment is to preserve both the information and the carrier. In an academic library, for example, the ideal way to save a text has been to
save the book or journal or whatever it has been printed to. Howev-

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er, given the fragility of media such as wood-pulp paper, not to mention magnetic tape or onion-skin paper, this is not always possible.
A review of the diverse formats and media on which library collections are recorded led the task force to accept the following premises:• All physical formats, from paper to magnetic tape, will decay overtime.
• Physical handling compromises all physical formats.
• All copying from one physical medium to another, such as frombook to photocopy or from LP to tape, results in some loss of information and will usually compromise the physical integrity ofthe original as well.
These are the facts that lead to a tension between preservation
and access. In the world of physical objects, one is usually bought at
the price of the other. The art of preservation is to minimize the riskof loss while continuing to keep collections usable for researchers.
This entails the following:• identifying the risks• deciding what measures should be taken to mitigate those risks• deciding which measures have priority
Little about preservation, other than its theory, is simple. Identifying risks can be tricky, and too often the risks become known onlyby the effects of decay, when it is too late to prevent loss. For example, we did not know much about the deleterious effects of light andhumidity on wood-pulp paper until tests performed in the 1970s
proved the connection. By that time, library collections were alreadyfull of books that had been printed on wood-pulp paper instead ofthe more durable, but also more expensive, rag paper. By the same
token, we do not know the effects of car pollution on paper. Early
test results indicate that car exhaust (as opposed to factory exhaust)
is deleterious both to rag paper and wood-pulp paper (Commission
on Preservation and Access 1997). If intervention is required to savean item or a collection of items, the timing of that action is also affected by factors that are hard to determine. As a rule of thumb, the newer the medium, the shorter its life span. Most new media, however,
have not been tested well enough to make it possible to predict rates
of loss; only when deterioration sets in do we begin to understandthe life span. Who would have thought that the so-called safety film
onto which nitrate film was transferred would itself deteriorate andfade in a few decades? And what does this mean for setting preservation priorities? Do we concentrate on stabilizing information on
newer and more fragile media, such as reel-to-reel tape? Does thatmean libraries should do so in lieu of deacidifying older books printed on acidic paper?
Other external factors enter into the calculation of risk: for example, funding and fashion, or supply and demand. Leaving aside
money for the moment, demand for library materials that are robust
enough to withstand use means that preservation departments must

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

first serve the needs of their local clientele. Much of the time and effort of preservation departments go to keeping the collections in circulation. Materials that are more frequently used receive more attention than do low-use items. Materials that are not frequently used, nomatter how short the expected life span of the medium, receive shortshrift. The Brittle Books Program, which started in the late 1980s, isthe exception that proves the rule. When the larger research community become aware of the limited life span of many nineteenth- andtwentieth-century imprints, the U.S. Congress allocated funds to the
National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve the informationin these resources that are, by definition, low-use. This has unfortunately not been true of feature and documentary films of the firsthalf of the twentieth century, whose value for research was recognized too late for rescue. This fate has almost befallen comic books
from the 1930s, and it will soon befall oral histories and ethnographic
recordings on cassette tapes.
Deciding what measures to take begins with assessing the need,looking at the costs of treatment options, and looking for value formoney. The most cost-effective means by far of ensuring the fitnessof collections is to prevent damage. Preventive care is the heart andsoul of most library preservation programs. The most cost-effective
treatments are those that can be applied globally; one example is ensuring proper storage conditions. The decay that comes from the “inherent vice” of all physical media can be retarded through proper
environmental conditions both in storage and in use. (The environmental needs [e.g., ideal temperature and humidity] of paper-basedmaterials differ from those of film-based materials, and optimal storage requires separate facilities for each material.) Other global preservation treatments include the following:• emergency-preparedness and disaster-recovery plans• research and testing of materials (such as bar-code stickers that do
not cause damage)• development of standards and specifications for treatments• education of staff and users about proper handling techniques
Collection-level treatments that act primarily to stabilize materials include the following:• deacidification• proper housing (e.g., using protective coverings, Mylar sleeves,and acid-neutral folders, or boxing a book that is fragile)• binding loose materials
Item-level treatments are more expensive than are collection-level treatments because they require not only treatment of individual
items but additional, often times skilled, labor to assess items andselect them from within large holdings. Item-level treatments include
the following:• microfilming• digitizing• preservation photocopying

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• creating photographic surrogates• remastering sound recordings and moving images
If preservation fails, then conservation is the next step.* Itemlevel treatments include the following:• book conservation, which may include repairing both the interior
and exterior, removing the old boards, reattaching pages, reassembling and resewing the text block, making a new binding, and creating a customized box to hold all the source materials;• paper conservation, which may include washing, mending, leafcasting, backing, deacidifying, and reattaching fragments; and• photo conservation, which may entail stabilizing edges, applying
emulsion, creating copy prints for access, humidifying, drying,flattening, and mending and matting vintage prints.
The purpose of conservation is to return an item to use, even ifthat use is very limited. Preservation experts commonly say that
preservation without access is not a good use of resources. A rarebook, such as the Bay Psalm Book, may be so deteriorated that it cannot be opened without causing further damage. The goal of intervention in such a case is to render the book usable—that is, capable ofbeing opened, even partially, under certain circumstances. In nearly
all cases, the goal is not to restore an item to its “original state.” Thatwould generally entail recreating the book using modern materials
with the same look and feel and technique. Such an approach compromises its authenticity. Age and deterioration are facts of life, andfew preservation experts strive to return an object to its originalform.
In part because funding for research and development efforts inlibrary preservation has traditionally been so modest, treatments
have been deployed in the past without proper testing, and thesetreatments themselves have turned out to be deleterious. Laminationis one example; the use of adhesive tape is another. Hence, contemporary experts honor two principles: first, do no harm; and second,
do nothing irreversible. This means carefully documenting eachtreatment and testing materials to ensure that nothing damages original items.
In all formats, the guiding principle of selection for preservation
treatment is to make an item fit for purpose. The act of choosing
what gets treatment and deciding why is based on a constantly
changing evaluation of the value, use, and condition of an item, andall of these factors are constrained by limited resources and inadequacies of technology. While the library and its personnel can be relied on to provide the expertise to assess condition, decide on treatments, track use, and so forth, the question of the changing valuationof the significance of artifacts for research and teaching is a matterthat needs to be informed by scholars and teachers.
* “Preservation” is the generic term for all types of treatments, both preventive
and corrective, that serve to stabilize items. “Conservation” usually refers to an
item-level treatment that involves active intervention.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

APPENDIX II
Charge to the Task Force

Rationale
Preservation has developed rapidly in the last two decades into a
critical component in the life cycle of scholarly collection development and management, taking its place among selection, acquisition,
cataloging, and service as one of the core functions of libraries andarchives. Most research libraries allocate resources for the purchaseof preservation services, employ professionally trained preservation
specialists, and many have created whole divisions within an organization devoted to collections care. Moreover, preservation specialists
now have a well-developed arsenal of tools and techniques available
to them to apply to specific collection maintenance problems, ranging in scope and urgency from emergency response and environmental controls to mitigating wear and tear from use and slowing
the self-destruction of various media.
Scholars and custodians, such as librarians and archivists, havemutual interests in the collection-building process. Although scholars are routinely and often intimately engaged with librarians in theacquisitions and use phases of collection building, they are usually
exposed only to specific aspects of preservation activities (such as
testifying to the value of a collection proposed for preservation microfilming) and rarely have the opportunity to view the preservation
function as a whole.
However, recent vigorous debates in the scholarly community
about the value of saving the book as an artifact in addition to preserving content from physically degrading books have raised important issues about scholars’ knowledge of and participation in decision making about the disposition of original materials after
preservation treatment. Through the creation of a task force, CLIR
proposes to engage the scholarly community in a systematic review
of its interests in this issue. The focus on preservation is part of awider series of CLIR initiatives, launched in 1997 with the jointlysponsored CLIR/ACLS task forces, intended to develop a forwardlooking vision of collection building in an electronic information environment built on the valuable research collections made of print
and audiovisual materials.

ChargeThe Task Force is charged to articulate for scholars and librarians ageneral context or framework for formulating and/or evaluating in-91

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92

stitutional policies on the retention or disposal of published and archival or unpublished materials in the form the works were created.
The Task Force should answer the following questions in developing a general framework for informed decision making about disposition of originals:• What factors make it useful and/or necessary to retain work in its
original form? Under what circumstances are original materials
required for research?
• When is it sufficient and appropriate to capture intellectual content through reformatting and not necessarily retain the original?
• What preservation options are available and what do they cost?
From both custodial and scholarly perspectives, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these various options?
The Task Force should, to the extent possible, draw on actual experience and empirical evidence regarding scholarly uses of materials and different libraries’ approaches to preservation. The analysis
should look at the following preservation treatments: conservation,
deacidification, off-site storage, preservation microfilming, and digitization.
Finally, the Task Force is specifically asked to consider the advisability and feasibility of creating one or more national repositories
into which one copy of all materials published in the United States
would be deposited for permanent retention.

Scope
The Task Force is asked to take its charge broadly, giving primaryconsideration to print formats, but also consider the burgeoning legacy of non-print and electronic research sources that demand increasingly urgent attention from preservation specialists. The Task Forceshould formulate its findings and recommendations in a way thattakes account of these other, often more fragile, formats and suggests
how the findings and recommendations might be extended to or
tested in relation to them.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

APPENDIX III
Selection for Preservation Criteria from RLG, Cornell,and Harvard

The Book as Object*
By the RLG Preservation Committee
For collection managers and curators reviewing materials, this list
can serve as an aid when assessing library materials that might berare or valuable. It explains why books become rare and deserve retention in their format.
Many items are important because of their format; often reasonsare clear for maintaining those titles in their original state. In othercases, the reasons may not be so clear, but before withdrawing or
converting to another format (due to deterioration, space-saving
needs, superseded editions, or duplication) they should be reviewed.
Hopefully, the considerations below provide an incentive to retain
those items possessing valuable or important information in their
physical format which might otherwise be lost.
The RLG Preservation Committee developed this list, with suggestions from two other RLG groups: the Collection Management
and Development Program Committee, and the Archives, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Program Committee. Documents
consulted were:• The National Archives and Records Administration document Intrinsic Value in Archival Material (Staff Information Paper 21).
• Transfer of Materials to Special Collections of the Archives and Special Collections Task Force, Rare Book and Manuscript Section,
Association of College and Research Libraries.
• An unpublished article, “The Preservation of Bibliographic Evidence,” by Ellen McCrady.
• New York Public Library Technical Memorandum No. 40, Permanent Retention of Materials in the General Collections in their Original
Format.
• The chapter, “Selection of Materials for Microfilming” in Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists (Chicago:
American Library Association, 1987).
This list is neither prescriptive nor presented in priority order. It
does not represent RLG policy and is offered for informational, education, and selection aid only.
* Source: Nancy E. Elkington, ed. 1992. RLG Preservation Microfilming Handbook.
Mountain View, Calif.: The Research Libraries Group, Inc. pp. 62-64. Reprinted
with permission.

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CONSIDERATIONS FOR RETAINING ITEMS IN ORIGINAL FORMAT

1. Evidential value—does the item possess or demonstrate:• The printing history of the item, such as registration pin marks,
cancels, printing techniques, and typographic errors.
• The binding history of the volume such as original sewing stations, binding structure, printed wastepapers used in the spine
lining, and cover materials.
• Marginalia, marks of ownership, and relevant ephemera laid or
tipped in.
2. Aesthetic value—does the item have:• Bindings demonstrating:- unusual technique or artistry.
- historical/developmental interest of structure or materials.
- signed/designer bindings.
- early publisher’s bindings.
• Other book decorations (e.g., gilding, gauffering, decorated
endpapers, fore-edge paintings).
• Illustrations not easily reproduced or meaningful only in theoriginal color or original woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, etc.
• Importance as an “artists’ book” where the book is designed as
an object.
• Original photographs.
• Maps of importance.
• Pencil, ink, or watercolor sketches.
3. Importance in the printing history of significant titles—does theitem possess any of these characteristics:• First appearance of the title.
• Important bibliographic variants.
• Important (or collected) fine press printings.
• Technique important to the printing history.
• Examples of early local imprints.
4. Age—determine if an item was:
• Printed before [specific dates] in [specific countries] (e.g., alltitles printed before 1850 in the U.S. or all books printed before1801).
• Printed during the incunabula period of any area (the first decades).
• Printed during specific later periods, such as war years, in specific countries.
5. Scarcity—determine if an item was:
• Rare in RLG member, NUC, and/or major European libraries.
• Of fewer than 100 copies printed.
6. Association value of important, famous, locally collected figures
or topics—does the item contain:• Notes in the margin, on endpapers, within the text.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections• Bookplates and other ownership marks of such figures; otherevidence of significant provenance.
• Important inscriptions and/or signatures.
7. Value assessed or sold at more than [specific cost].
8. Physical format or features of interest—does the item possess anyof these characteristics:• Contains significant examples of various forms demonstrating
technological development.
• Exhibits unique or curious physical features (e.g., interestingwatermarks, printing on vellum, wax seals).
• Is an ephemeral material likely to be scarce, such as a lettersheet, poster, songster, or broadside.
• Contains some manuscript materials.
• Is a miniature book (10 cm or less in height).
• Is of questionable authenticity where the physical format may
help verify it.
• Is representative of styles, fads, mass printings currently rare.
9. Exhibit value—is the item:• Important to an historical event, a significant issue, or in illustrating the subject or creator.
• Censored or banned.

Conservation Treatment: Library Materials to be Retained in theCollection in Original Format
Cornell University Library
Department of Preservation
and Conservation
Reproduced with permission

The following criteria are designed to help identify library materials
which should be preserved in their original format. In general, thismaterial should not be replaced by reprographic means, reformatted,
rebound, or repaired without careful consideration by the Conservation Liaison Specialist and the appropriate curators and bibliographers. The criteria should be applied to library materials regardlessof shelf location, as it is recognized that circulating collections often
contain materials which should be preserved in original format (seealso RLG Preservation Manual, “Book as Object,” pp. 62–64). Items
identified for treatment from the general circulating collections towhich the criteria apply should be brought to the attention of the
Head of Rare Books (or appropriate curator) with a view to transfer
to a sequestered collection.
1. Pre-1850 imprints and imprints issued after 1850 that can be considered rare or especially interesting because of time, place, andsubject.
2. Materials having notable illustrations, maps, engravings etc, adding to the work’s interest and/or value.

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96

3. First editions of significant works.
4. Books with bindings of special interest because of type, period orbinder.
5. Manuscripts and typescripts.
6. Association copies and materials having autographs of significance.
7. Material having added notes, annotations, marginalia etc. adding
to the interest and or value of the work.
8. Materials in special closed collections.
9. Rare ephemera and other elusive items, such as songsters, sheetmusic, broadsides, almanacs, charts, original historic photographs, etc.
10. Notable standard reference works no longer in print such as dictionaries and encyclopedias.
In general, all books printed before 1850 and in original bindings
will be restored rather than rebound, with all the features of the original bindings retained.

Library Preservation at Harvard: A Definition of Terms
Harvard University LibraryPreservation Center
January 2000 revision
Reproduced with permission

Conservation treatment, reformatting, commercial library binding,environmental control, disaster preparedness and response, andpreservation education and training are the core initiatives that makeup a comprehensive preservation program. Implementing such a
program requires skilled staff, carefully selected and implemented
technologies, and sound management practices.
CONSERVATION: Protecting and restoring the original object

The term conservation embraces activities that improve the condition of an object or protect it from damage. Paper treatments, for example, include everything from mending a small tear to washing,deacidifying, and other complex chemical and mechanical treatments. For books, treatments range from tipping in an errata sheet tofull conservation rebinding. Conservation is also an appropriate
strategy for preserving certain non-paper media. Conservation of
motion picture film, for example, can include ultrasonic cleaning,
splicing of breaks, and sprocket repair. Conservation activities also
include such activities as pamphlet binding, boxing, enveloping, andother means of protective enclosure.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

Collections conservation is the treatment and protective enclosureof materials that are valuable in the aggregate (e.g., the literature of a
subject area or period, posters of a particular genre). An individual
item is more important as it relates to other materials in the collection than it is as a disassociated object. Typically, 19th and 20th-century books and journals in circulating collections are the focus of acollections conservation program. While collections conservation
techniques are often complex, items with similar problems can begrouped for batch treatment. Significant numbers of materials areconserved annually (tens of thousands in a large research library)using archival-quality materials and techniques. The goal is to preserve large collections of scholarly significance and therein to improve the library’s overall service performance.
Special collections conservation is the treatment of materials that,while they may be important because of their relationship to larger
collections, also have intrinsic value (and sometimes great monetary
value) as isolated objects—much as do important pieces in museum
collections. They may be valuable because they are rare, unique,were owned by an important person, are very beautiful or for otherhistorical or aesthetic reasons. Conservation treatments involve extensive written and photographic documentation and the use of instruments such as powerful microscopes. The goal is to protect treasures having extraordinary local or worldwide significance.
REFORMATTING: Reproducing information at risk

Reformatting is the copying of library materials. Deteriorated objects—brittle books, for example—are copied onto more stable materials (silver halide microfilm, alkaline paper) to preserve information. Decaying nitrate negatives are copied onto stable film; motion
picture film is copied to new film or to videotape to protect the original from the wear and tear of repeated use; photographs may be rephotographed using analog or digital means in order to protect originals from handling; sound recordings are copied to new media toensure that they remain usable. Not all copying is motivated by preservation concerns. New versions are sometimes created to improve
distributability and/or functionality. Scanned text that has been processed with Optical Character Recognition software is word-searchable and can be distributed widely over networks. Conversion of information to digital form can sometimes create rather than solve
preservation problems.
COMMERCIAL LIBRARY BINDING: Managing the use ofcontractual services

Commercial library binding is the binding and rebinding of volumes
in a largely automated commercial facility. In general, journal issues
are bound together to collocate them and to prevent damage andloss; paperbacks are bound to make them more sturdy for libraryuse; hardcover books are rebound because they are damaged and do
not merit conservation treatment.

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ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL: Achieving hospitable storage
conditions

Creating and maintaining storage conditions that promote the longevity of collections is the single most beneficial preservation strategy that a library can pursue. Controlling temperature, relative humidity, light, and air quality within appropriate ranges can radicallyslow the deterioration of paper, leather, cloth, plastic, and other materials ubiquitous in libraries. In general, cool, dry, low-light spaces
free of gaseous and particulate pollutants are optimal. Ongoing monitoring of conditions is essential to maintaining preservation-quality
conditions.
EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE: Protecting
collections from hazards

Emergency preparedness for libraries involves prevention, preparation, and response. Prevention is the reduction of risk, including inspecting, maintaining, and repairing library buildings. Preparation
involves writing a disaster plan, assembling essential supplies, developing communications channels with essential service providers,
and training staff to react effectively. Response is the skillful salvaging of collections damaged as the result of minor destructive incidents and catastrophic events.
STAFF AND USER EDUCATION: Protecting collections throughteaching

The goal of preservation education programs is to build awarenesswithin the library user community of the fragile, irreplaceable natureof research library collections, and to teach and encourage improved
care and handling practices. Printed materials, training sessions,seminars, and conferences are typical communications vehicles employed for this purpose.

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

99

APPENDIX IV
Expenditure Trends in ARL Libraries, 1986-2000(available at http://www.arl.org/stats/arlstat/graphs/2000t4.html)

200%

SerialExpenditures(+192%)

170%
Library
Materials(+149%)% Change Since 1986

140%

TOTAL
(+105%)

110%

Total Salaries(+92%)
OperatingExpenditures(+78%)

80%

CPI(+57%)

50%

Monograph
Expenditures(+48%)
20%

-10%
1986

1988

1990

1992

1994

Fiscal Year

1996

1998

2000

100

The Evidence in Hand

APPENDIX V
Non-print Holdings in ARL University Libraries

ARL university libraries report the following holdings as of June 30,
1999. Data are compiled from ARL Web site (http://
fisher.lib.virginia.edu/newarl/).

Type of holding# of libraries responding
Microform units
111
Government documents
97
Computer files
102
Archives and manus.
107
Cartographic materials
106
Graphic materials
101
Audio materials
104
Video and film
103

# of holdings
455,866,843
41,827,671
578,637
2,361,544
27,885,352
64,083,533
5,385,634
1,335,441

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

APPENDIX VI
Comparative Costs for Book Treatments

Comparative Costs—One 300-page Book
Calculated by the Library of Congress Preservation Directorate$3,000$2,500$2,500$2,000$1,600$1,500$1,000
$430

$500
$10

$15

$65

Binding/Boxing

Mass
Deacidification

Preservation
Facsimile

$185

$0

NOTES
Some materials that are microfilmed may subsequently be boxed. Objects that are bound may later be mass deacidified, and selective objects treated by a conservator this year may be digitized ten
years hence. However, we do not generally thinkof various preservation and digitization options as
being logically applied to the same materials in alibrary or an archives. By the same token, digitization and preservation activities cannot logically besubstituted for one another. For example, digitization is not seen as a substitute for deacidificationor conservation. The digitization technology,

Microfilming

Conservation

Base Level
Digitization

Enhanced
Digitization

aimed at improving access to information, is not
generally applied to the same materials that are
saved in their original format through mass deacidification or conservation. Nor are the materials
selected for deacidification the same materials thatwould normally be candidates for reformatting
either through microfilming (due to advanced embrittlement of the paper) or through digitization(to promote much broader public access). Given
these caveats, the relative costs of such activities
continue to be of interest to persons engaged inmanaging library collections and archival materials and in making short-range and long-term plans

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(notes, continued)
for preservation and access to media and the information it contains.

Costs
For Binding/Boxing and for Mass Deacidification,
unit costs are rounded off to the nearest dollar; foreach of the other activities in the chart, comparative unit costs are rounded up or down to thenearest increment of $5.00. For the first six functions, costs include contract, supply, staff and related administrative costs at LC. The second category for digitization, described below in thecontext of the RLG DigiNews article under “Enhanced Digitization,” includes averaged costs forthese activities at LC and the National Archives, aswell as project costs from other digitization
projects and from published sources.

Conservation
Hands-on conservation treatment, preventive conservation measures, and specialized housings are
generally provided for materials that are both atrisk and a high priority to an institution, as well as
for rare and intrinsically valuable materials
among permanent research collections. Given thewide variety of formats, media, and treatment
challenges represented in rare books, it is facile toattempt to present a cost that purports to represent
the “average” expenses incurred for professional
conservation treatment of a single, representative
book. Nevertheless, the $430-per-book “Conservation” cost given here represents the average, inhouse, Library of Congress cost for treating rarebooks between 1998 and 2000 in the Book and Paper Section of the Preservation Directorate’s Conservation Division. The costs, which generally
ranged from $275 to $720 per volume during that
period, were derived by dividing the total numberof rare books treated into the aggregate costs forconservation materials, permanent and temporary
staff salaries and benefits, and, when appropriate
for special rare book treatment projects, the costs
incurred by hiring additional conservators as parttime contractors to supplement LC staff resources.

Mass Deacidification
Deacidification is an economical approach to keeping books and unbound paper-based materials
alive and available in usable form. The Libraryuses this technology to save important, endangered materials that are central to its mission,
treating acidic and slightly brittle items from thegeneral and special collections and the Law Library that must be preserved. Current LC perbook deacidification cost is $13.40; adding $1.85/
book for selection, book charging, packing, transportation, quality control, and reshelving, the total
cost is $15.25/book.

Preservation Facsimile
The exact reproduction of a printed volume, including illustrated matter. This was formerly
called “Preservation Photocopying”; but the characterization has been changed because image capture is now usually accomplished by digital scanning of the original. Printouts on preservationquality paper are bound according to librarystandards. The cost for a 300-page book represented here includes aggregated costs for scanning,covering material and binding, labeling, insertionof tattle (security) tag, and associated administrative expenses such as invoicing.

Digitization
Two approaches to digitization serve preservation
and access goals. Base level digitization offers amethod of reformatting at-risk materials like brittle books. Enhanced digitization offers improved
access to materials that have high informational
and/or visual value such as significant manuscriptor graphic collections including, for example, folklore artifacts, grey-scale images, exhibit-quality
photographs, pamphlets, broadsides, scripts, music scores, or the correspondence of famous officials, writers, composers, or scientists. The cost ofenhanced digitization may be justified for special
collection and non-book materials for which research demand is high.
Base Level Digitization: For digitization of at-Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

103(notes, continued)
risk materials, the LC Preservation Directorate requires high-quality master image files that allow
for a broad range of processing and display options; economical digitizing methods including
both on-site and off-site capture of disbound materials; machine-readable, minimally-encoded text
generated by fully automated processes of Optical
Character Recognition and mark-up; and basic
bibliographic description. On-site capture is essential for rare materials that must be dealt with inhouse—i.e. materials that will not be sent off-site
for reformatting. This model provides a baseline ofdigital images and text onto which “value-added”
enhancements (such as the essays, finding aids,
and the kinds of exhibits done for American Memory collections) can later be added. These minimum requirements, without “value-added” enhancements or elaborate bibliographic data,
contribute to lower per-page costs. The average
cost for digitizing a book page, including scanning, metadata creation, automated generation of
OCR and minimally-encoded text, and associatedactivities, including identifying and preparing materials, quality control, and project management, is$5.32. For a brief, 300-page book, this works out to$1,600.00.
Enhanced Digitization: Costs represent an “adjusted average” derived from two rounds of LC/
Ameritech projects, NARA’s Electronic Access
Project, and various other projects and publishedsources. (See Steven Puglia, “The Costs of Digital
Imaging Projects,” RLG DigiNews, Vol. 3, No. 5,
pp.1-6, Oct. 15, 1999.) The cost is derived from a
broad range of digitizing models, which include
low-, medium-, and high-quality digital images;
item-level bibliographic description for various
types of materials; and “value-added” enhancements such as essays, finding aids, or exhibits.
Costs of creating machine-readable texts withcomplex SGML-encoding are not included. The
average cost for digitizing a book page, including
scanning, metadata creation, creation of enhancements, and other associated activities such as

identifying and preparing materials, quality control, and project management, is given as $8.35 in
Table 2 of the DigiNews article referenced above.
For a brief, 300-page book, this works out to$2,500.00.
As confirmation of this rough $2,500.00 cost estimate for digitizing a small book, see also: Mark Y.
Herring, “10 Reasons Why the Internet Is No Substitute for a Library,” in American Libraries, Vol. 32.
No. 4 (April 2001), pp. 76-78. The author describes
Questia Media, Inc.’s recent expenditure of $125
million, digitizing 50,000 books that are now available electronically. Again, this comes out to roughly $2,500.00 per book. Note: As with the “baseline” and “enhanced digitization” costs given
above, this does not include the expense of maintaining digital versions over time.

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APPENDIX VII
National Recording Preservation Act of 2000

H. R. 4846

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105

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The Evidence in Hand

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The Evidence in Hand

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The Evidence in Hand

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The Evidence in Hand

Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections

113

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The Evidence in Hand