National Humanities Alliance

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

The National Endowment for the Humanities programs have been a catalyst in stimulating a national response to the preservation crisis.  The federal leadership role remains critical to ensure the preservation of important cultural materials.  NEH produced a plan in 1988 in response to a Congressional request to select and preserve for subsequent widespread use some three million embrittled volumes important to this nation's heritage and scholarship.  The target of three million was but one-fourth of the twelve million unique and endangered titles and an even smaller percentage of the 80 million deteriorated volumes estimated to be housed in our nation's libraries and archives.

Recognizing that we could not save everything, the Endowment's Preservation Office -- which has since become the Division of Preservation and Access -- opted to encourage cooperative preservation programs by setting an achievable 20-year goal and focusing upon the most endangered, valuable, and unique materials.  The microfilming that began in 1990 and continues to this year has proven the worth of such an approach.  The modest federal support for NEH's programs serves as both a multiplier and a magnet: Over 70 libraries, archives, and other institutions have worked hard to identify and rescue over three-quarters of a million critically important materials.  With support from NEH, these institutions have been able to leverage additional funds many times greater than the federal investment.  Nearly one-third through the estimated time period, we are nearly one-third through our goal.  

Threat to an Achievable Goal

The goal, however, already modest in comparison to overall need, is threatened seriously by budget reductions.  At the March 6, 1996, House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, it was reported that budget reductions for preservation programs mean that 20,000 brittle books and 230,0000 newspaper pages will not be microfilmed this year.  Over 900 archival and special collections of unique materials judged highly significant by U.S.  institutions will not be preserved or made accessible.  and 130 cultural objects identified as valuable and requiring preservation will continue to languish, undocumented and unavailable for study.  Perhaps even more far-reaching for the general public, nearly half the people who would have been trained in preservation skills and awareness will be excluded from regional education programs.

A central tenet of the NEH brittle books program is that no book shall be filmed twice.  This guideline is based upon the sound logic of economics at the national level.  The need to avoid duplication has given rise to sophisticated national bibliographic systems that enable libraries to declare their intention to create microfilm and the needed time to complete the work.  "The accomplishments of this program to date are profound and the implications are far-reaching," is how archivist and librarian Paul Conway described the program to colleagues in a recent library journal.  "The present worth of this program to taxpayers is at least $70 million [much of that cost borne by libraries and archives] ...  The value of this collection will continue to grow with time..." (Library Resources and Technical Services, January 1996, 40(1), p.75).

Reductions in the preservation program of NEH strongly affect not only the scholarly community, but all citizens concerned with our history on national, state, and local levels.  As an example in purely practical terms, when the coordinators of a large, cooperative NEH-funded microfilming project learned that their three-year grant had been pared by one year, cultural and historical collections dealing with state histories of Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee had to be cut from the list of embrittled materials targeted for rescue.  Some 37 percent of these collections, already identified as important for preservation microfilming, remain on shelves, slowly crumbling to dust.

If the brittle books program is not brought back up to its original target funding, these unique historical resources, along with tens of thousands of other primary sources, will never be available to scholars, students, researchers, or the general public.  As primary resources, many of these unique materials provide content for new textbooks, K-12 curricula, and even the growing World Wide Web educational resources.  Deteriorating volumes that are highly acidic due to the chemistry of their paper disappear quietly and steadily, with no remedy to stop the absolute loss of their information.  This is particularly unfortunate for this group of identified materials because the research libraries of the country have worked effectively and collaboratively to select and prepare them in anticipation of microfilming.  After this preparation and remaining on schedule with the first third of this filming, future reductions will meant that many collections, though targeted as highly valuable for our nation's needs, will lost for posterity.  Federal support is necessary to meet the nation's preservation needs.

Limits to Public Access and Training

We may first point to the scholarly and educational interests that are served by NEH's preservation program, but the numerous and varied contributions to small, isolated institutions and to individuals cannot be overlooked.  Thanks to the regional presentation centers that have been established with NEH funds, preservation assistance and training have been provided to thousands of people who have, in turn, been prepared to identify, preserve, and make materials accessible to countless others who need them.

The SOLINET Preservation Field Service in the Southeast, for example, has taken a leadership role in providing training and continuing education for some 2,600 individuals through 131 workshops and presentations since 1988.  The participants in these sessions have been able to rescue and preserve countless volumes in their local institutions, providing access to more materials to the American public.

Similarly, with NEH support, the regional field service of AMIGOS in the Southwest has developed a preservation capacity that has answered over 6,000 inquiries on how to preserve library and museum collections and trained 500 individuals to do basic repairs and collection conservation.  Another 3,000 persons have benefited from NEH-sponsored preservation presentations given throughout the region.

Such field service centers, funded largely by NEH grants, are the first to offer assistance when weather-related disasters present serious preservation problems in a local region or state.  When tornadoes in Texas took roofs off buildings and exposed valuable local history collections to rain and wind, dozens of volunteers from the regional preservation field service responded to the call for assistance.  They could act quickly and knew how to rescue the badly damaged research materials from destruction.  Budget reductions will require that such programs be eliminated, or at the very least, severely curtailed.  This is an especially great loss for the small historical societies and archives around the country that do not have the financial resources to address individually these concerns.  Such organizations have relied on NEH-funded programs to assist individuals who want to learn more about preserving family documents and books, to train generalist staff to respond immediately to emergencies and disasters, and to provide centralized reference assistance for answering thousands of questions every year.

Funding from NEH's Division of Preservation and Access also has supported scientific research that will benefit collections at all sizes and types of libraries and archives.  A new, simplified process for monitoring temperature and humidity developed by the Image Permanence Institute provides a cost-effective and simple way to determine how to improve storage environments for many types of historical and cultural materials including paper, film, and magnetic media.  Such far-reaching programs can only be spearheaded at the federal level.  The lead taken by NEH.  in establishing this particular environmental research.  which is also supported by foundations and institutions, will benefit us all by extending the useable lifetimes of hundreds of thousands of library and archival materials throughout the nation.

Federal Leadership in Cultural Progress

The point of these examples, of course, is to illustrate the broad ranging assistance that comes from NEH's Division of Preservation and Access.  Although disbursed throughout the nation, these activities and programs are anything but random and duplicative, however.  The National Endowment for the Humanities, in cooperation with other organizations concerned about preservation of our intellectual and cultural heritage, has carefully developed all its preservation programs to reinforce and strengthen this nation's capacity to protect and revere its heritage from the well-established ivy covered columns of a great university, to a small town's historical archives, to a family attic with forgotten genealogical records and photographs.

We must recognize that libraries and archives cannot carry out nationally-valuable preservation efforts on their own.  The leadership exercised by the National Endowment for the Humanities has meant that hundreds of individual efforts are leveraged and added to an overall nationwide program, rather than standing apart and redundant.  This principle holds true whether the program is microfilming of brittle books and newspapers, training of preservation experts, or conserving of special materials.  A shared body of knowledge, skills, tools, and resources is being created that enables the individuals and institutions that form our nation's preservation enterprise to move ahead with shared confidence and expertise.

In fact, NEH's brittle books program is being hailed by librarians as "creating the first virtual library in the world that also happens to be a vital source for digital conversion." The brittle books collection exists in many locations, yet is accessible as an entity in national databases; when completed, it will rival the collections of many major research libraries in this country.  "We owe it to present and future scholars (to say nothing of the taxpayers who foot the bill) to make it fully accessible to patrons as a complex collection with many uses and many points of access," states librarian Conway, who challenges colleagues to move the brittle books literature into the digital arena.  Only with the NEH's carefully conceived and well executed plan could such a vision be entertained as a reality, one-third of the way through the brittle books agenda.

Today we are seeing the widespread results of federal funding and NEH leadership in the myriad preservation actions of local, regional, state, and national organizations.  The Division of Preservation and Access has stimulated participation and cooperation from universities; state, public and special libraries; historical societies; archives; and museums, often with matching financial support from local sources.  All 50 states have now invested in the NEH's Newspaper Preservation Project that is preserving the history of local communities as recorded in over 200,000 local papers.

Rather than reduce funding to support these preservation activities, now is the time to strengthen NEH's investment in a program that is producing far more than Congress anticipated even nine short years ago.  The thousands of contributors to nationwide preservation efforts energized and catalyzed by NEH are now on board, not only in producing the expected numbers of preserved items, but in helping plan and create new preservation options and services.  This is the time for Congress to stay invested in a strong program that will document our nation's historical and cultural legacy.

© 2008 National Humanities Alliance (Washington, DC).  All rights reserved.
Last Update: 28 October, 2002 - 04:36 PM - EST