Preservation and Access

Despite what you might think, or learn in library school, librarianship is a profession of paradoxes and challenges. Many times librarians and other individuals outside the profession talk at length about new technologies and trends that present librarians with challenges externally. However, there are challenges inherent in the job we do as librarians, and one in particular is balancing the mutually exclusive demands of preservation and access.





It is likely that libraries will carry on and survive, as long as we persist in lending words to the world that surrounds us, and storing them for future readers. - Albert Manguel, p. 231, The Library at Night

People usually associate what it is that librarians do with the collections we care for. For a millennia, this was always a physical collection - in a variety of formats - including books, magazines, newspapers, card catalogues, et cetera. To this day, people do not think of librarians when they think of libraries, they think of the items in our collection. Perhaps this is a testament to the effectiveness of our profession in that what we do looks so effortless that we fade into the background. That said, library collections today have great variances as to the “physicality” of their collections. Research databases, periodicals, and so on are increasingly accessed in a digital format. Our job as librarians is to preserve the resources in our collection, regardless of their format. In order to do this job to the best of our ability, books are stored in a manner most conducive to their preservation, as are periodicals and electronic items. Preservation implies, though, that the items should be handled as little as possible - if at all. Less exposure to dirt, grime, light, and human hands helps preserve those physical objects for as long as possible. Preservation is very important as, collectively, libraries represent a form of cultural memory, as Alberto Manguel highlights in this quote from The Library at Night:

After the Nazis began their looting and destruction of the Jewish libraries, the librarian in charge of the Shloem Aleichem Library in Biala Podlaska decided to save the books by carting away, day after day, as many as he and a colleague could manage, even though he believed that very soon “there would be no readers left.” After two weeks the holdings had been moved to a secret attic, where they were discovered by the historian Tuvia Borzykowski long after the war ended. Writing about the librarians action, Borzykowski remarked that it was carried out “without any consideration as to whether anyone would need the saved books”: it was an act of rescuing memory per se. The universe, the ancient cabbalists believed, is not contingent on our reading it; only on the possibility of our reading it.

Another concept that people associate with librarians is access or that they can use anything in a library to fullfil whatever it is they are looking for. Many of the processes I am involved in (cataloging, OPAC and database design and management, classification, barcodes, etc) assist people in discovering and locating what they are seeking in a library. Some might argue that the user is the most important part of the library, and the time and effort expended to meet the needs of the users is a testament to that. A user can check the catalog from home - or in the library - find what it is they seek, examine it, use it, or take it home, even. They can even take it with them in some cases.

It is the balancing of these two competing mandates - preservation and access - that is one of the paradoxes of the profession. There truly is no hard and fast rule for determining where, say, access, accedes to the demands of preservation. This is something librarians must determine in their setting. Most public libraries give great weight to access, which trumps all, except in special cases. On the other end of the spectrum are art museum libraries and other special collections that grant access to their collections under conditions most conducive to the preservation of the items in their care: white gloves, climate control, and close staff supervision.

Balancing the demands of preservation of, and access to our collections is a dilemma that librarians deal with (in varying degrees of success) on a daily basis. Rather than my poor attempt at some elegant conclusion to this short discourse on access and preservation, I will close with a quote from p. 8 and 9 of Nicholas A. Basbanes’ Patience & Fortitude:

I decided to make a last stop at the Boston Athenaeum, one of America’s great book places and home of a magnificent research library that itself has been a work in progress since 1807.

There, I not only turned up the three elegantly printed volumes on a remote shelf in a basement storeroom, but found them in remarkably pristine condition, with pages that had remained uncut, and presumably unread, after all this time. As I was signing the books out at the front desk - the Athenaeum did not yet use a scanning device to record loans to its members, although that quaint practice was about to change as well - I confirmed by the blank cards tucked inside the rear pastedowns my assumption that they were, in fact, leaving the library for the first time. “Eighty-one years,” I said aloud, shaking my head with amused gratitude. “You wonder who they bought these books for anyway.” James P. Feeney, the silver-haired circulation librarian who was checking me out, paused momentarily and fastened his unblinking eyes on mine. “We got them for you, Mr. Basbanes,” he replied evenly, and resumed his work.

What Feeney did not say - what he did not have to say - was that the books had been set aside by his predecessors for the better part of a century on the off chance that one day somebody in need might want to see them. Fortunately, the fact that nobody had requested the titles before me was not considered sufficient grounds for discarding them, a practice employed by so many other libraries in these days of reduced storage space, stretched operating budgets, and shifting paradigms. It was as if the collective hands of Aristophanes of Byzantium, Petrarch, Robert Cotton, Christina of Sweden, Thomas Jefferson, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg - every temporary custodian of the world’s gathered wisdom - had reached out through the swirling eddy of the ages and placed in my hands the precious gift of a book. It was an act of faith fulfilled, and we, their heirs, owe no less a compact to the readers of the third millennium.