Preserving Cultural Heritage: Introduction

When Library Trends devoted its first issue to preservation (Tauber, 1956), the state-of-the-art term was conservation, and the articles dealt with binding, treatments, stack maintenance, and “discarding” (weeding). The focus was almost entirely on libraries, except for an article by Hummel and Barrow on treatment for library and archival material (Hummel & Barrow, 1956). The next Library Trends issue devoted to preservation was published twenty-five years later (Lundeen, 1981), and although conservation was still the preferred term, the range of topics was broader. To binding and treatment were added new areas: administration, education, paper chemistry, disaster preparedness and prevention, microforms, and the conservation and preservation of sound recording and photographic collections. The focus was still squarely on libraries, with little mention of archives. This 1981 issue does, however, show the first signs of an interest in international collaboration and some cross-fertilization of ideas in Buchanan’s article on disaster prevention (Buchanan, 1981). In the last twenty-five years, “preservation” scholarship has evolved to a dual pursuit: the idea that we need to preserve and the theoretical issues concerning preservation—what to save, how to save it, and how such decisions are made. Also, preservation is now equated with history and memory, thus cultural heritage preservation is currently a subject of considerable interest to a wide range of stakeholders. It is increasingly being perceived that the issues of the archives, library, art, and historic preservation fields have much in common, certainly more than was apparent in the past, and each field can learn from the others. Some of these issues emerge from the attempt to define from varying perspectives the concepts of cultural property ownership that were developed in colonial times; from the expropriation of cultural heritage for political and ideological aims; from changing understandings about intellectual property rights in an