Keeping Books Alive: Their Preservation and Restoration (Part 2)

While each of these environmental factors are essential to take into consideration when helping to preserve books, it is also important to know some other issues that come in to play with these factors. Different treatments for the preservation and conservation of books and other materials fall under two categories.

The first is called “macro.” This category includes treatments that affect many or all holdings that a library has. This includes climate controls, filtered lighting, expanding utilization of acid-free paper by publishers, and any initial preempting preservation practices increasing the initial durability and strength of library materials.

The second category is called “micro.” These are piece-level treatments to conserve and restore individual documents. One example of this would be transferring page images or intellectual content from impermanent to permanent paper or from paper to microfilm. The different environmental concerns listed in the previous article fall under the “macro” category.

Deterioration, once it occurs is irreversible. Still, when it comes to maintaining the optimum environment for preservation, cost is one major issue.

Even if it spent most of its life in "good" conditions, the life expectancy of any material is reduced by any period of poorer conditions. The issue then comes down to whether or not a material should be copied or provided with an optimum environment. The most cost-effective answer is to provide it with a good environment. This also helps preserve the visual values that cannot be copied and the artifactual values that cannot be restored once fully deteriorated.

Formal, published standards are important so that those responsible for preserving collections have authoritative support to back up their claims. They must be flexible enough to apply to different climate, technical, economic, and functional situations. If they were too loose, decisions would be made based on what is cheaper instead of what is best so conditions would end up further away from an optimum conservation environment.

Just as librarians have had to make many decisions on what can and cannot be preserved and how, the fact that preservation is such a large-scale problem has grown to national awareness. This rising awareness of the issue of preservation is important because this means that funds can continue to go to libraries to help them maintain the necessary environment to conserve materials that we would not want to lose. There has been an increase in preservation programs within research, academic, and public libraries as many individuals, institutions, and organizations contribute actively to the development and growth of efforts to save America’s intellectual heritage as documented on paper and other media.

Even though it is not centralized or systematically organized, it is flexible, multifaceted, and opportunistic. Much of the funding comes from federal sources or national foundations. Two major centers for scientific research on preservation and conservation are federal institutions. Three principle federal sources for preservation grants are the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Historic Publications and Records Commission, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

These grants have a large effect on how much is preserved. Conservation and restoration of artifacts and the appropriate treatment for each item are considered the responsibility of individual libraries. Treatments must meet each library’s immediate needs and benefit the local clientele.

It is said that microfilming is today’s preservation of choice since preservation grants require film copies to be available at a cost. Research made by Harvard says that average costs for deacidification versus microfilming averages at $6-10 for deacidification and $90 for microfilming. Experiments are now underway to strengthen paper so that it will be possible to rejuvenate materials instead of just stopping further embrittlement. This would save on the costs of having to do any preservation and would help libraries to conserve even more books.

Not only are there many efforts required of individuals working with materials deemed worthy of preservation but there are also things that those who regularly read books or use libraries can do. The preservation process begins with identifying those materials that are undergoing physical or chemical deterioration. Some are found by stack maintenance personnel who are always on the lookout while others are encountered almost daily at the circulation desk as volumes are returned. Still others are found by everyday library visitors. It helps when an individual points out a book that they noticed on a shelf that was in bad shape, especially when this book might otherwise have gone unnoticed for years. Any deteriorated books or other materials that are found are forwarded for a selection decision. They look for signs such as damaged bindings, detached or torn pages, and flaking embrittled paper.

It is a great help to point out these books to library staff but it helps even more for people to treat books and other materials with respect so that they can be more easily preserved for tomorrow. These efforts plus the efforts already rising by federal, local, and private institutions to help in the preservation and conservation effort are immensely valuable in the purpose to save these materials. Even if it involves chasing a wild animal out of a library, each small act assists in maintain artifacts that we would not want future readers and academics to miss out on.

The preservation and conservation of books is an essential topic to learn and discuss in order to continue these efforts to help libraries with the overwhelming task of deciding what can and cannot be preserved. Also in the act of treating those materials for conservation. Although ideas last forever, books and other materials do not and it is essential that everyone do their part to help them last as long as possible.