The
Barbara Goldsmith Preservation Lecture
Thank you very much for that generous
introduction. I am quite honored to be speaking here this evening, and I shall
take full advantage of that honor by talking to you from a personal perspective
about something that I have thought about for decades: how does what we
preserve, and what we do not preserve, shape the creation of knowledge. Despite
what may appear to others to be a varied career path, to put it
euphemistically, I have always felt my professional life to be one seamless
whole, propelled by an insatiable curiosity about the past of our species and
especially how we record things about ourselves and our surroundings and why,
how we pass this information on, and why, and how we use the evidence that has
been left to us to shape our ends�the
ability to shape our ends being my definition of knowledge.
Putting aside monetary considerations for the
time being, how should we think about the value of the materials we choose to
preserve, think about them in ways that help us provide appropriate treatment
to the numerous collections in our charge, especially when we cannot possibly
do justice to even the majority of them? While I do not wish to diminish the
importance of money, I do not think that lack of funding per se is the largest
constraint on our effectiveness in meeting preservation goals. More money will
not solve our problems. I shall return to this point.
My thirty years in the history and library
professions have produced two simple and deeply held convictions: first, that
loss�of
information, of knowledge, of evidence from our past�is
inevitable. As Shakespeare wrote in an early sonnet, �everything that grows/
Holds in perfection but a little moment,� and, he goes on, to hold on to that
perfection is futile. �To make war upon this bloody tyrant Time,� to take up
arms against death and decay, is doomed to disappointment in the end.
Hence my second conviction: that our job as
preservationists�by
which I include anyone who cares about the continuity of the past and the
present�our
job is to manage and minimize that loss. We should not attempt to deny that
inevitable loss by fetishizing objects�be they books and old newspapers,
artworks, or collectibles of any sort�but
we should reduce the risk that what is truly of value will be lost, and we
should let that which is not valuable die its own natural death. In cultural
institutions such as this university, we should manage that loss explicitly in
the service of cultural missions�in
the case of New York University, of research, of education, of the life of the
mind, and the well-being of our polity, including the life of this city.
So our job as preservationists is to choose, to edit, to perform triage on the abundance of stuff that comes at us, to discern what is of enduring value and ensure its integrity over time. In other words, we are in the selecting business, not the warehousing business. Warehousing is a very important function, and does play a part in preservation both for libraries and for archives, especially for legal and fiduciary purposes. But I do not associate that holding action�what archivists would call records management�with the more critical function of selection that we must do in the service of our cultural missions.
These ideas about loss and the importance of
selecting what to keep and what to lose seemed so self-evident to me as to be
unremarkable, literally, at least in my first two careers�as historian
of medieval Russia and then working at the Library of Congress. It was not
until 4 years ago, when I started at the Council on Library and Information
Resources, that I began regularly encountering people, both in the academy and
in the public at large, for whom these two ideas seemed�how shall I
put this?�controversial
or �contestable.�
As a Russian medievalist, I have worked in
American, European, and Russian libraries and archives on a period of history,
before 1700, when recording anything visually or textually was rare. I
conducted my doctoral research in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, when
Brezhnev was still alive. What 17th century sources had survived
war, revolution, and frequent natural catastrophes�known in
Russia simply as �winter��were
often mysteriously �unlocatable� when called for by a citizen of a capitalist
country, such as your humble speaker. That what survives from the past would
constitute the historical record is a very shaky notion, one deeply politicized
in Russia, even today.
Of course, the Russians, it must be admitted, have a far more creative attitude to history and the historical record than we of the Anglo-American tradition. They are not positivists, they do not repose deep trust in so-called objective facts. They are frank about using the past�what survives and does not survive of the past�as a way of shaping the present and future and they have always been so. If they do not like the current version of the past�if it somehow proves inconvenient to someone in high places, for example�they discard it and create a new one, an act of legerdemain that some of you know from the images of Trotsky and Bukharin that magically �disappear� from photographs over time, and which we have witnessed firsthand again since 1989. (This wholesale rewriting of history, incidentally, has always been the task of historians. Librarians and archivists had a higher and much riskier calling: they had to save everything, no matter how damning, and be sure that none of it fell into the wrong hands, such as those of your humble speaker.) This understanding of the uses of the historical record did not begin with the Bolsheviks. Rather, it was because the Bolshevik regime perfected that tradition of �creative history-making�, and practiced it with great, bald-faced flair, that made them so successful. We scholars of Russia struggled mightily to understand the past from a very fragmentary record, one with a rich overlay of painfully didactic secondary literature that tried to pass for primary documentation. As graduate students, we Russian specialists were much more alive to the fragility of the historical record, almost obsessed with how documents had been created, by whom, how they happened to survive, and in what form, and what had not survived, than our peers in American history beavering away at colonial trade records or some such. They seemed to us na�ve�they took their sources more or less at face value. Of course we were snobs about this�we told ourselves that our command of exotic languages and nearly indecipherable Old Church Slavonic paleography, our brutal travel schedules and scary field stories from Mother Russia�made us more authentic, or at least heroic, as historians. But of course we envied our colleagues in American history, their simple and largely justified trust in the authenticity and integrity�physical and otherwise�of their sources. We almost felt that we were in a different business. We were more like Sherlock Holmes than Bernard Bailyn. We always asked why the dog did not bark. If the dog did bark, we knew someone had put the dog up to it. Disinformation. (I will say parenthetically the current post-modern skepticism toward all forms of recorded information is fundamentally and radically different from the measured caution with which we approached our sources, primarily because we read human psychology and intentionality differently. But that is another story.)
My sense of the inevitability of loss and the importance of managing it was deepened, though in a delightfully benign way, during my 9 years at the Library of Congress. At the Library of Congress, we collected voraciously, yet inevitably, incompletely. There were always collections that got away�more often than you would think we turned things away because we could not provide proper stewardship. Loss seemed self-evident there too, under the best of circumstances, from the purely practical constraints of space, time, and inadequate resources, not from the malign influence of ideology or politics. On the contrary, America is so unlike the Soviet Union was in its information policy, and, frankly, that was part of the problem: in a democracy there are sincere and actually well-funded efforts to preserve an �undistorted,� unshaped, �complete�� record. But this is impossible, because the record is huge! Given a democracy in which nearly all citizens are literate, empowered to produce and consume records, feeling entitled to have their voice enter into the historical record, debate�let alone consensus�about relative value is disdained as virtually undemocratic.
So how do we discern enduring value in
research materials�and
remain good democrats, small �d�? What is enduring value, in a world in which
is it possible to acquire or document more than any one institution or even a
network of institutions can properly take care of? To avoid making decisions
about what to preserve is, in this universe, irresponsible. And I am talking
not only of the digital universe of information, which is frighteningly large,
but also of the old-fashioned analog world of information which, if you look
beyond printed matter, is also daunting in scale.
Although it is our job, as librarians and
archivists, to answer that question, we do not have an exclusive claim to
wisdom on the subject. We at CLIR recently convened a group of scholars,
librarians, archivists, and of course some academic officers�the
presidents, provosts and deans who hold the purse strings�to advise us
about how one is to think about enduring and inalienable value in the
artifactual collections that crowd our libraries. What do we need to preserve
and serve among hundreds of millions of books, journals, films, recorded sound,
broadcast media, prints, photographs, maps, pamphlets, you name it. (And how do
we pay for it?)
We asked them to focus on deciphering the
values inherent in non-rare items, to describe the research value of them, a
subjective assessment at best. Our scholars were quite distinguished for
scholarship in their respective fields, but they were nonetheless surprised to
be asked to serve on this group. They did not see themselves as having
experience and expertise as preservationists, despite their professional
dependence on research collections, so, as a control group, they were in many
ways perfect for our purposes.
They were perplexed and intimidated by the
technicalities of preservation, by the size of library collections, of a scale
so evidently unmatched by available resources for good stewardship; by the
fragility of even the most robust media, such as paper, even rag paper, and the
greater fragility of film-based items�of the entire visual history of the past
150 years�and the yet more fragile media that carry the aural, or sound history
of the past 100.
In order to engage the issues, they needed to
�problematize� the matter, as they said, to make it intellectually compelling.
They enjoyed interrogating the artifact, and they quickly saw the value of an
ever widening scope of research materials, even as they protested that trying
to keep all this stuff was clearly impossible. They urged the library community
to reduce potentially wasteful redundancy of effort, saying that duplicative
collections will lose their value over time as more and more information can be
retrieved electronically. They want more of each type of genre, fewer exemplars
of each. More specialization and focus in libraries, not more homogeneity. The
promise of relatively easy if still expensive access to secondary sources
through electronic networks led them to define the unusual, the piquant, and
basically all non-print materials as worthy targets for the attention of
preservation experts.
One distinguished scholar from New York, who I
hope is not in the audience this evening, a great advocate for preservation,
said that he found the discussion about how and why artifacts are valuable to
be very stimulating, but, he added ruefully, it would have been even better if
we had not been so focused on making decisions.
But of course, we are focused on making
decisions, that is the moral basis of our work.
So where does that leave us? Well, our task
force did come away with several very strong statements, which are all in the
report, The Evidence in Hand. Loss is inevitable, if regrettable. We can
maximize what we preserve if we create economies of scale, something critical
in the digital realm but now, increasingly, seen as critical for analog
collections as well. We should develop priorities for preservation action that
reflect a balance between the interest of present and future users, the dynamic
and changing research agendas of scholars, and, of course, the stability�or
instability�of
the object itself.
No magic formulas there, I am afraid. But we
can, in fact, develop priorities for preservation based on these guidelines.
The
most effective way to do that, in my view, is to take a risk management
approach. The risk assessment process model I refer to was developed by the Library of
Congress during my tenure there and has been successfully adopted for a number
of collection-management issues, including but not limited to preservation. It
has been described in some detail by a CLIR report, Managing Cultural Assets
from a Business Perspective, so I shall be brief.
Library
preservation differs from museum preservation in that librarians are always
looking to use and fitness for purpose. The risk assessment model is focused
entirely on fitness for purpose: how is that object going to be used, and what
really threatens its usefulness? Let�s take an ordinary library object�a book. What threatens
to make a book unusable? It could be misplaced or inadvertently misshelved. It
could be incorrectly cataloged and hence unretrievable; or it could be
languishing uncataloged in a backlog somewhere on a book truck or cataloger�s
desk. It could be embrittled and crumble when you turn the pages. Or it could
be physically damaged through vandalism�the illustrations
razored out�or just plain stolen. In each case, the book
might as well not even exist for all the good it does library patrons. In the
language of risk assessment, the risks to the book�s integrity and usefulness
fall into four categories:
��������� Bibliographical control: do we know
what the item is?
��������� Inventory control: do we know where it
is?
��������� Preservation control: is the information
intact and the item usable?
��������� Security control: is the item at undue
risk of theft or mutilation?
Risk
management begins from the premise that, because collections are the primary
assets of the library, or often, together with real estate, of the university,
the question is not �How much can we afford to put into these collections?� but
rather, �How much risk do we take if we fail to invest in our asset base?� It
guides managers in how to identify specific risks in their libraries and how to
decide what level of risk is acceptable�the cost of doing
business�versus unacceptable. It provides a
step-by-step description of a process of risk evaluation that involves everyone
in the institution responsible for the collections. This means not only those
who work directly with collections, but also those responsible for security,
buildings and grounds, and, most importantly, the information technology
infrastructure. After all, inventory and bibliographical controls are
absolutely essential to all aspects of security, preservation, and service. So
whoever maintains the online catalog, or the integrated library system, and
keeps it up and running, is as critical to the good stewardship of library
collections as a cataloger or a rare book conservator.
Well, this is all great�the scholars think we
should save as much as possible as cheaply as possible and I�ve just referred
to a system of collection management that can maximize every dollar spent on
preservation by deterring loss to begin with. You may have noticed by now that
I keep avoiding the topic of enduring value, what it means and how we identify
it. So why avoid the subject: what principles should we use�can we use�when
selecting for enduring value?
Well, the answer is simple: value comes from
use. What endures is that which we use, today or tomorrow, to create our
present and our future. There is more merit than you might think in stipulating
use as the basis for selection for preservation. Collections of things that are
used comprise at least an accurate record of what people at specific times in
the world need for specific purposes. I remember struggling 20 years ago with
the fact that certain types of records from the medieval past of
Russia�petitions to the tsar, for example, or liturgical texts�were created
and preserved in relative abundance, while records of daily life, which we know
were, in fact, created because we have found accidentally preserved caches of
letters on birch bark in Novgorod, were not preserved. Well, we in the present
may be more interested in the personal lives of medieval Russians than their
spiritual or economic lives, but that is not how they saw it, and that is
surely worth thinking about. The choices that were made back then about what to
save really speak about who those people were and what they valued. The exact
same will be said of us 700 years hence.
I also think use is the best place at least to
start because preservation serves the purpose, ultimately, of memory. And we
can see that use is at the very heart, or the very neuron, of memory.
Recent work on the neuroscience of human
memory shows that we take in information about the world through all our senses
and at many different levels, much of it processed through several centers of
emotion (that is, to add affect that will help the brain to quickly figure out
the information�s value to our survival; we should not have to think too hard
or too long about whether or not a car speeding towards us endangers us or not;
the brain should compute this in time to save our lives, and it does that by
activating fear). The information we process without cease during our waking
hours may or may not rise to consciousness as we speak of it, that is, higher
consciousness. Specific memories are strengthened and endure longer if we
retrieve them in the course of living our lives�in
fact, only if we retrieve and use them in various mental processes. But
memories are shaped or rather reshaped every time they are recalled, or used.
They are put into new web of associations�whatever caused this recall, whatever
the current context is. No memory can be said to exist outside of a context, as
an isolated fact, and that context is the redeployment of information, the
recollection of something similar that we experienced in the past in order to
solve a problem that presents itself to our consciousness in the present. More
importantly, no knowledge can be created outside of the act of remembering.
The implications for this have nothing to do
with post-modern skepticism about objective points of view. The post-modern has
built into it a suspicion about the motives for various configurings. I do not
share that suspicion. I am merely pointing out the reality of our neural
circuitry of emergence�that it is the bringing together of various strands of
thought, of remembered impressions and feelings, into a moment of emergent
consciousness that is the basis for our cognition and understanding of what we
perceive. What William James called attention, our ability to attend to things
at given moment.
Let me repeat: there is no such thing as a
memory that exists or can exist outside of a network of associations, outside a
specific context, past, present, or the imagined future. The associations can
be reinforced, changed, or even nullified in some cases, but the purpose of
memory is to put our present experience into a recognizable pattern that can
lead us to act appropriately in a new situation. Again, we cannot �know� or
have knowledge of how to act this time, this place, without the act of
recalling and remembering.
Recorded information has longer durability
than human memory, of course, and we invented writing words and photographing
images and recording sounds chiefly to extend our memories artificially. But I
believe that recorded information can and should be curated as extensions of
our all-too-human memories.
The 2 sonnets of Shakespeare I quoted from
earlier are devoted to the subject of time: how it ravages what is ephemeral�beauty for
example�yet
cannot touch the things that are real. While acknowledging that one�s beloved
may, and indeed will, age and die, the poet also argues strongly that death and
decay can be transcended not only in heaven, but right here on earth. For
Shakespeare, the cycle of sonnets he wrote on this subject was specifically
telling his beloved that the way to keep love alive is to have children, so
that some essence of the beloved is constantly being reborn. For preservation,
this means that we must emphasize use, reuse, the constant intermingling of the
past and the future through our present actions.
I mention this because I want to establish
this principle as the ultimate benchmark of value for research and cultural
materials: that which can be creatively remade into the future. It is no
coincidence that the copyright regime established by the Founders also argues
that the purpose of protecting the rights of creators is to allow fruitful
ideas to circulate and multiply in the marketplace of ideas. Let them compete!
By reusing the past, by finding usefulness�value�in present
things and reusing them, they pass in part to the next cycle of life. That is
how preservation helps to create knowledge, and that is how, through
preservation, we can shape our ends.
We save the past in
order for it to be used again, and again, and again. That is why the library is
a sacred site. Not because of the objects within, the metonymy of books, but
because of the promise of a building filled with the spirits of men and women
who are waiting to be discovered and reborn in us. The library is a sacred site
not because of the sterile contemplation and veneration of objects, but as
shelter for the rough and loving manipulation of ideas, the calling forth of
memories created by others and made so magically available to us through the
passionate acts of preservation.
Let me say in closing that the one resource we
are in greatest need of for the work of preservation, so critical to the
present and future, is human will. We cannot afford to continue the
professional segregation of preservation from access, with users relying on
others to have acquired, preserved, cataloged what they want. Our scholars must
become their own librarians, and our librarians must become scholars again,
they must return to that professional training that includes subject expertise.
The advent of digital technology, which does not allow for the leisurely
passage of time to prove the enduring value of something, is forcing every man,
woman, and scholar to become their own preservationist. We must all be stewards
of our own digital creations. I hear from computer scientists that we will soon
solve the digital preservation problem. Storage is cheap and will get cheaper
and we will be able to save everything. But �saving everything� solves the warehousing
problem. It does not solve the preservation problem. Decisions about selection
and value are only getting harder and harder in the digital realm. We must all
now grapple with the thorny issue of what is enduring value.
There are no right or wrong answers. There
are, as Le Corbusier wrote, only �living pasts and dead pasts. Some pasts are
the liveliest instigators of the present and the best springboards into the
future.�[1]All others will die. These words of Le Corbusier were cited recently by the
New York Times Magazine in an issue dedicated to the rebuilding of lower
Manhattan. How do we reconstruct a place shattered by wanton destruction? Think
of what you need to begin to imagine rebuilding lower Manhattan, and the lives
robbed of sense there, and you can get a sense of enduring value and what we
must select to save from loss. This is not hard. But it does require human
will. That, we know, we have, and we can never lose. We can and we will shape
our own ends.