Columbia University can film about 1,000 volumes a year with its own funds, and the volumes are chosen largely on the basis of local demand and use. Over the past six years, Federal funds have supported the filming of some 55,000 additional volumes at Columbia, and these have been chosen for their distinction, their fragility, their coherence as collections, and their importance to scholars and citizens in locations far beyond the campus. Moreover, NEH support has encouraged universities to increase their own preservation budgets. As one example, the provost of Cornell has allocated supplementary funding to the University's preservation department for each of the past six years, in recognition of its achievements. Again at Cornell, NEH funding has stimulated private support from, among others, the Mellon, Culpeper, Luce, Reynolds, and Delmas foundations, and the University has had, since 1984, nineteen competitive grants from New York State for preservation activity.
Digital technology presents an entirely new set of preservation opportunities and challenges.
The microfilms in the national preservation program can be converted to digital format should it become the preferred mode of long-term storage and easy retrieval. In the meantime, as education and information services move increasingly into electronic formats, the NEH Division of Preservation and Access serves as an indispensable forum for encouraging an approach to digitization that is rational, coherent, and coordinated, and that considers not just the capacities of the technology but the nature of the materials and the needs of the American public. When the twenty-year national commitment to save embrittled materials was first announced, the New York Public Library responded to the challenge with a plan for filming, over the course of the twenty years, scarce and rare materials from its great collections on American history and culture. But because of reductions in the current NEH budget, the latest grant to the Library will enable it to film only half the number of items it had hoped to save in the next two years. There is a danger that the Library will fall inexorably behind in its preservation work on behalf of scholars and readers everywhere.