It was quite a natural growth. I suppose that it's natural growth throughout the library world. My personal experience is that preservation is like motherhood and apple pie. Everyone agrees that it's a good thing. We wouldn't have acquired, cataloged, and housed these collections if we didn't intend to preserve them.
Preservation is also very different from one library to the next.
It must be firmly grounded in the mission of the institution. Harvard's mission as a research institution requires that we preserve much of what we hold for absolutely as long as possible. When the preservation program officer's job opened up here, it had a number of attractive attributes. One was working in a library system of this size and complexity. Another was the focus on teaching and training.