Preservation Management for Libraries, Archives and Museums

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Preservation Management for Libraries, Archives and Museums", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 6, pp. 513-514. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710760445

There are two main concerns in this book (as well as several concerns about it). One is to describe and discuss the challenges and achievements of preservation specialists in the library, archive, and museum (and at times art gallery) field. The other is to describe and discuss the impact of conflict and war on library, archive, and museum services. This understandably takes it into risk management and disaster planning. Since it sets these concerns in the context of heritage and culture, it comes as no surprise, then, to find contributors relating such descriptions and discussions to programmes and projects like saving antiquarian artefacts in Iraq and the Lebanon, recognizing heritage and intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples, and asking about the implications for both scholarship and heritage.

All this then leads the book to describe and discuss preservation policies and plans (only in general terms), consider the issue of tangibility and intangibility and the related issue of surrogacy and authenticity, touch upon emulation and migration, refer in passing to projects that preserve newspapers and digital broadcasts, speak about value and valuation here and there, note unevenly that costs and applicable law matter, and conclude awkwardly with assertions about access. From this, I am sure readers of the review will get the idea that the book covers a lot but not particularly well. It is like a conference proceeding where everyone (thinks) they have something interesting to say but, when its all brought together, there is a lot of duplication and missed opportunity.

Putting to one side for the moment a large well‐documented chapter by René Teijgeler on preserving cultural heritage in times of conflict, there are ten other chapters from well‐credentialized contributors (like John Feather, Marilyn Deegan, and Mirjam Foot) that gives us the Cook's tour. All are original though part of chapter 5, by Deegan and Tanner, appeared in their own Digital Futures (London, Facet Publishing, 2002). All together, these chapters pick up on most of the key issues although you have to read the lot to get the lot. Continually things come round and round again, even though each new chapter adds a snippet more – rarity from one, oral tradition in another, audio and video in a third, reverse engineering in another, and digital repositories elsewhere. So anyone coming to the book needs to skim and scan, use the index, chase about, and follow up references (chapter references are good), but a sequential reading is a frustrating experience.

It is sad to see, also, how some of the potentially most interesting ideas – like that of digital repositories and that of outsourced commercial alliances – appear in throw‐away comments and these are perhaps the very things readers most want to read about – after all, challenges for the 21st century? Other readers keen to get nitty‐gritty things like the finance, the law, and the technology will also get frustrated – for finance, some useful things on costs and value (but a theoretical model of valuation is, for the busy practitioner, no substitute for some detailed advice on cost effectiveness and cost benefit); for law, very little systematic at all (strange when heritage and property rights are so topical and well‐documented elsewhere, and need to be included in books like this, where risk implies liability, and where digitization implies licensing); and for technology, here something on applicable standards, there a bit on open archiving, and so forth). In fact, the index suggests more systematic treatment of all these things, so look hard at the text itself before buying.

Teijgeler's chapter on cultural heritage in times of conflict is fascinating and thought‐provoking in itself, and draws on relevant recent commentary in the area. At the same time (no fault of his), I am led to wonder about the connect between the rest of the book and this chapter. Ostensibly preservation can cover this and what the other chapters do and say, but there is an undistributed middle – what about applying the ideas in the others to the challenge of preserving in times of conflict. A large number of sources (many on the internet) allow the reader to do that, but Gorman and Shep (both at Victoria University of Wellington) really needed to join up the dots. After all, people are paying the best part of 50 pounds sterling for the book. The book is readable, provides useful sources, and picks up on current international debate, but looks thrown‐together despite its impeccable sub‐editing. For all that, it will go inevitably into any self‐respecting collection where library and information studies in general, and preservation and heritage in particular, are studied, mainly for student use.