Library and Archives Conservation

The dramatic changes in the last two decades in the attitude of librarians and archivists toward conservation have been matched by an acceptance on the part of most professional conservators of the new role of others in the preservation of books and records. Twenty years ago all too many librarians were unaware of, or ignored, the alarming deterioration of books on their shelves and conservators seemed to think that they, alone, could handle the problems if they could get into the libraries and take charge. Slowly over the years custodians somewhat reluctantly perhaps, began to accept conservation as one of their management problems and conservators began to realize that the dimensions of the problem are such that by themselves they could never begin to do what has to be done.

In 1971 Frazer Poole, then Assistant Director for Preservation at the Library of Congress, reported that six million of the seventeen million books there were too brittle to use and that even to keep 10 percent of those six million in the national collection would cost eighteen million dollars and take thirty years to restore that 10 percent to usable condition. It was about then that Mr. Poole predicted that almost all of the nonfiction published between 1900 and 1939 would be unusable by 1999. James Henderson, at that time Head of the Research Libraries, New York Public Library, had similar convictions about his collections and almost every library in this country was in the same situation.