A Good Book is the Best of Friends, the Same Today and Forever
– Martin Farquhar Tupper (1842)
To make a book the same today and forever – this is the mission of the preservation programs that have developed at research libraries in recent decades. Undertaking to ensure survival of the cultural and intellectual record of humankind has for centuries challenged societies. At the Harvard Library, the scope of this challenge is formidable. First assembled in the seventeenth century, the Library holdings today include more than 13.5 million volumes and millions of other objects including manuscripts, maps, scores, photographs, and recordings, as well as such recent innovations as microfilm and CD-ROMs. The responsibility of caring for such library treasures as the manuscript poems of Emily Dickinson or the fragile page proofs for James Joyce's Ulysses, densely marked up in the author's hand, belongs to the Harvard University Library Preservation Center and the Harvard College Preservation Services Program
"The mission of a comprehensive library preservation program," says Jan Merrill-Oldham, Malloy-Rabinowitz Preservation Librarian in the Harvard University Library and Harvard College Library, "is to protect materials that are in good condition, to improve the condition of those that are damaged but hardy enough to sustain continued use, and to reproduce materials that are so severely deteriorated that neglect would, mean total loss." Among the strategies employed to accomplish these goals are conservation (binding of new materials and stabilizing or restoring damaged materials), re-housing in boxes and other archival enclosures, microfilming, digitizing, copy photographing, sound re-recording, and cleaning and replicating of motion picture film and videotape. Improvements in environmental conditions are an essential backdrop for all activities dedicated to prolonging the life of library collections.
Merrill-Oldham directs the work of the Harvard University Library Preservation Center and Harvard College Library Preservation Services program. A conservation laboratory in the Preservation Center is responsible for treating rare books, manuscripts, drawings, prints, photographs, and other materials held in the libraries' special collections. Conservators work on projects ranging from painstaking cleaning and repair of unique and extraordinary valuable objects to complex problem solving. "How will we preserve the plants collected, pressed, and labeled by Henry David Thoreau?" Merrill-Oldham ponders.
A grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission funded the conserving and re-housing of the over 3,500 daguerreotypes – among the earliest photographs ever taken – in Harvard's libraries and museums. Harvard's extensive collection of daguerreotypes offers exciting glimpses into the first uses of photography as both scientific tool and artistic expression. Images found across the University include one of Harriet Beecher Stowe; members of Harvard's class of 1852; and one of the first successful renderings of the moon, taken from the Harvard College Observatory in 1851. (An online exhibit of these and other startling images can be found at the center's web-site.) According to Merrill-Oldham, the beauty of such a project is that these unique images have been drawn together to create a virtual collection that cuts across 13 separate repositories. The project, along with others that are under way, suggests Harvard's potential for systematically preserving and scanning other photographic formats (stereographs, tintypes) and visual resources in general.
While the laboratory in the Preservation Center conserves the libraries' great treasures, the conservation lab in Widener Library attends to large-scale treatment of the vast general research collections that compose part of the College Library holdings. "Collections conservators" (as opposed to rare book and paper conservators) devise methods that facilitate archivally sound treatment of large numbers of materials – most of which are important because in the aggregate they make up great collections. More than 20,000 items will be handled in the Widener lab next year.
Imaging Services in the College Library operates six cameras to microfilm brittle holdings. (Some of the collections surveyed by the Preservation Center have revealed embrittlement rates of more than 80 percent.) Imaging also manages a photo lab, where two expert photographers make high-quality copies of prints, posters, drawings, and other visual resources.
Care of the collections is ever present in the minds of preservation staff. One of the most important projects under way is the development of a University-wide disaster-preparedness and recovery program for the libraries. In addition to compiling lists of disaster-recovery services, supplies are being stocked and hands-on workshops planned.
Any discussions of preservation strategies inevitably turn to the subject of digitizing for access. "We are entering this arena cautiously, focusing efforts not on the use of technology but on use of the right technology," says Merrill-Oldham. Digital capabilities will be exploited to achieve timeworn preservation goals – to protect original materials from overuse, and to make replacement copies when originals are too deteriorated to salvage. Contrary to the vision of the future painted in popular magazines, however, digitization is not a one-size-fits-all solution. In some cases, traditional approaches to preservation will better serve the interests of researchers and scholars.
Harvard's centuries-old commitment to sustained collecting dictates the need for a concomitant effort to protect that investment. Merrill-Oldham describes the scope of the challenge as "considerable," but says, "If we work intelligently and systematically, over the years the results will be increasingly visible." She notes that she and her colleagues remain in awe of the richness of Harvard's holdings. "No two days are the same," she says. "Interesting work."