I very much appreciate your interest and concern for the permanence of historical documents, and applaud your efforts to reduce the use of acid papers by the federal government. In May 1995, NYPL is planning a conference dedicated to the issue of recycling. The Times article focuses on the 15-year crusade against acidic paper by Barbara Goldsmith, an author and social historian, a trustee of NYPL, and a former Commission board member. The seminar will focus on the administrative aspects of preservation activities, recognizing that each individual and department within a library has a responsibility to help ensure enduring access to scholarly resources. The lead instructor for the event will be Lisa Fox, who also led the first two seminars.
Registration is limited, and there is a deadline for applications.
The Preservation Directorate of the Library of Congress has provided the Commission with a preliminary report on ways of resolving preservation issues associated with digital-imaging technologies. The study, Guidelines for Digital Preservation of Visual Materials , presents an overview of the best image-capturing methods and recommends guidelines for defining the best method for a given collection. It focuses on image quality, leaving issues such as media life and migration, access and delivery strategies, color and moving pictures, and conversion throughput for later study. Both binary Group 4 and JPEG gray-scale schemes were compared from both a visual perception and a storage point of view. In many cases involving all-text source material, the JPEG gray scale rendition of the original image was considerably better than the binary Group 4 rendition with only a slight storage penalty.