65th IFLA Council and General
Conference
Bangkok, Thailand, August
20 - August 28, 1999
Code Number: 043-102-E Division Number:
VI Professional Group: Preservation and Conservation
Joint Meeting with: - Meeting Number: 102
Simultaneous Interpretation: No
Matching preservation decisions with collection development
policyGalina Khislovskaya
IFLA PAC Programme, Eastern Europe and the CIS M. I. Rudomino
All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature Moscow, Russian
Federation
Paper
There is overwhelming evidence of a basic transformation in collection
management resulting from and accompany the paradigm shift to a global
digitized information library service. Constrained budgets coupled with
rising prices, expanding networks and sophisticated technology, along with
an explosion of electronic publishing and copyright, have placed
limitations on library services. This makes for a challenging transition
and in many cases provocative ones. The effects of these difficult
external forces on collection management are multiple and profound.
Nonetheless, the principles of collection development and collection
preservation which constitute collection management seem to remain
basically the same, namely:
- acquisition of materials and making accessible resources that are of
relevance to current information needs of a library clientele;
- inclusion into collection and preservation projects of documents
that will serve future generations;
- creation of new cooperative schemes avoiding duplication and
title-for-title preservation selection approach;
Collection management which controls the processes for identification,
selection, acquisition, organisation, evaluation, maintaining and making
resources available, has been playing one of the most decisive roles in
satisfying users' needs which is a library's ultimate goal and objective,
and the essence of action plans.
Collection development and preservation policies that stem from an
overall institutional mission have been, if not always at least over the
last 2 decades, designed in such a way as to avoid unnecessary duplication
among institutions.
Another common attribute of these interelated notions is transparency
of allocated budgets or accountability to external agencies to prove
expediency of expenditures, since unprecedented explosion of a number of
appearing publications and a threatening scale and speed of deterioration
of documents mandates only reasonable and justified expenditures. Staff
cuttings affecting both collection development and preservation stimulates
application of appropriate approaches based on increased productivity.
All of these are characteristics of any coherent collection development
and preservation policies and are forcing the need for applying large
scale preservation strategies.
I beleive we all agree that dichotomy "warehouse-gateway" manifests
itself in a most varied way throughout the world. This paradigm shift
affects all libraries and their policies, collection development and
preservation inclusive, but local variations are very tangible due to the
specific conditions found in each country or group of countries. In this
respect Eastern Europe and CIS is a very diverse area. The closer the
country to West the more similarities with neighbouring Germany, France,
Scandinavian countries you may find. Moving to East shows less
similarities, but more problems inherited from the past and deepened by
the present.
What is common to understanding the inner links between collection
development and preservation policies is the usage of a more or less the
similar terminology defining collection management. This helps to draw
lines of comparison between different practices.
My report is based on communication with librarians from Russia some
other CIS countries Mongola, Baltic states, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Czech
Republic and Romania. It is quite a large sampling, justifying broader
extrapolation of findings.
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to colleagues from all
these countries who helped me gather missing data for this report. I
suspect it is very superficial, since collected data originated mainly
from national libraries. Still I hope it will give you a little insight
into what is happening in Eastern Europe and CIS countries in regard of
large scale preservation programs.
The starting point for an overview will be availability or absence of
mission statements and of collection management policies.
All national libraries, with a few exceptions have articulated their
mission statements and derived from them policies for collection
development. In quite a number of cases preservation policies were also
generated in compliance with the stated missions.
For example in Latvia priorities in collection preservation are as
follows:
- archival collection of Latvian piblications
- Letonica
- rare books and maniscripts.
In principle, all National libraries in a region, as national
repositories are doing the same with respect to the national repertoire,
exteriorica and special collections.
Regional libraries at least in Russia are in the process of redefining
their mission statements and reconsidering collection management
approaches. Their preservation efforts are focused mainly on regional
publications and special collections with a few deviations stemming from
economic or cultural differences like, say, in Karelia which industrial
profile- timber - necessiates collecting and preservation of related
material regardless of the place of publication. Written collection
development statements are widely spread practice, whereas fixed
preservation policies are still a rare case on a regional level and, in
general, in public, special and university libraries. Again this
conclusion is based on my Russian and CIS experience.
A second important point is availability of a formal structure
responsible for collection management that binds the relationship in the
institution. Again geographical diversity leads to diversity in the forms
of delegating responsibility for collections management.
Less money intensifies competition for sharing allocated resources
between different departments. Hence, there is growing understanding that
a library has to delegate functions of collection management to a certain
structure or a particular person which will handle both collection
development and preservation.. This new agenda is being supported for
example, in the National Library of Chech Republic which set up collection
and preservation division, by the National and University Library of
Slovenia (with its Preservation Department). In Russia, there are also
marks of treating current selection and acquisition and collection
preservation as inseparably linked functions. Therefore it is normarly a
deputy director who is in charge of making institutional decisions related
to collection management. Regrettably, in major Russian federal and
regional libraries subject bibliographers, conservators, staff responsible
for digitization, microfilming or maintaining collections in reality do
not communicate as they should because of structural barriers.
The conservation department is traditionally under a deputy responsible
for research activity whereas collection development is supervised by the
deputy in charge of selection, acquisition, cataloguing, circulation, and
as we say "other library activities". The impact of this tradition on
collection preservation is not the best one. Very often reporting to
different heads hinders communication, badly affects decision making and
consequently leads to misuse of avalaible funds and to losses in
preservation. Appropriate and unbiased inter-institutional decisions are
often made at different sorts of library councils representing different
specialists from different departments. This practice may be found in
Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Bulgaria.
Third important line of comparison is adherance to large scale
preservation programmes versus title-for-title preservation. Proper
accomodation of collections in stable environment and their careful
handling was named as most significant mass preservation strategy.
Items added to collections have been chosen as a result of a long
process of identification and selection . Therefore by definition they
deserve to be preserved. Hence adequate storage and handling for all
previously selected materials is considered prior to other mass
treatments. This strategy is especially strong in less economically stable
countries, where there are fewer opportunities to apply other large scale
preservation options. This does not mean, however, that all libraries have
achieved ideal storage conditions or solved all handling problems. Not at
all. But these strategies are pointed out by all libraries as fundamental
institutional goals.
For example, National Library of Latvia is building a new repository to
provide better storage that will prolong the lifespan of collections; the
National Library of Slovenia is planning to complete a new building for
housing collections in 2001. In 1997 the same library built a special
safety 80 square meters vault to accomodate most valuable artifacts.
Provisions are made to safeguard other collections by purchasing
equipment, like dehumidifiers. The Czech National Library completed a new
building in 1995 which has a housing capacity for 4 million volumes. It's
aim to accomodate old foreign literature contributed to proper housing of
historic collections in the old library building.
For the majority of Russian , CIS and as far as I know for Bulgarian
libraries, this strategy is the only affordable strategy in the current
financial situation. During my recent visits to Moldova National Library,
Kemerovo (Siberia) and Smolensk Regional libraries, my assessment was
confirmed on this point: tidiness, cleanliness of these repositories is
beyond any criticism .
Boxing is identified as another preventive measure which all libraries
are favorable toward. Boxing programmes in general are designed for
special collections. Therefore identification and selection of materials
for boxing is not so complicated. Curators of collections recom-
mend for boxing artifacts into which libraries made great capital
investment. For example Russian Library of the Academy of Science (BAN) a
couple of years ago boxed all the documents from the Peter the Great
Library.
The LFL boxed all the documents dated 15,16th,17 th century. NL of
Latvia keeps most of all its rare books collection in boxes. In Slovenia
after a condition suvey of medieval codices an extensive boxing program
was designed and is currently under way.
In most cases productivity of boxing is a critical ussue. Only BAN has
a highly productive boxing machine donated to it by LC. Other libraries
make boxes manually. It is true that making a box takes less time than
conservation treatment, but still it hasn't reached the point where this
preservation method might be called a mass treatment without any
reservations. Another factor hindering the process is the high price of
acid free cardboard and dependance on importing materials from Germany,
UK, an France. As far as I know, the Czech Republic and Hungary
manufacture acid-free cardboard but the marketing of these products is
poor, even though their prices are quite competitive. For this reason, we
in Russia launched a project supported by OSI on production of domestic
acid free cardboard. This is a joint project of BAN, Research Institute of
Paper in St. Petersburg and IFLA PAC Regional Center. In a few months RNL,
RSL, BAN, LFL, 3 regional conservation centers and the Federal Archive
will get their portion of acid free cardboard on conditon these
institutions submit lists of selected documents for boxing. This
requirement will stimulate taking very weighed decisions.
As for as I know, LFL is going to box its rare collection. The Rostov
upon Don Library is selecting its most valuable items from its historical
regional collection. Likewise the Vladimir regional library has chosen
rare regional periodicals.
As soon as Russia starts to manufacture acid-free cardbord other CIS
countries will be able to order it without the difficulties which
connected not so much with money as with customs procedures.
Meanwhile some libraries in CIS and Russia are using acid cardboard for
boxing. IFLA PAC Regional Center is trying to raise the level of awareness
of the threats in using non-archival materials.
Binding, is by large the one area where selection decisions are made
not by subject bibliographers but by staff working in the stacks and in
readers services departments. It is a long established practice (say, in
Bulgaria, Russia, Uzbekistan, Moldova etc) originated from the assumption
that if a title is worn and torn, it should be bounded. In fact this is an
example of pure title-for-title approach even though libraries bind quite
a lot. Practically each library has a binding department. In the majority
of cases these workshops serve general collections like a department of
the Care of Modern collections (responsible for binding boxing, cleaning)
in the NL of Czeck Republic, or Binding department in the NL of Latvia, or
yet another example of Kemerovo Reginal Library LFL where identification
and selection of materials for binding in fact has nothing to do with
involvement of subject bibliographers although under current limitations
it is their duty to make a decision on consultation with other staff. We,
at the LFL, once made an attempt to bring subject bibliographers to the
stack where preidentified materials returned from circulation were
collected and waited for the final verdict of subject bibliographers. This
attempt resulted in mutual frustration: subject bibliographers refused to
spend their precious time and expressed readiness to pass the
responsibility to circulation and stacks staff, who in turn were irritated
by the speed of work of subject bibliographers. So the experiment ended
with mutual dissatisfaction, which doesn't mean though that creation of a
mechanism linking bibliographers and technical staff should be postponded.
In fact recent developments made us in the LFL to once again revise old
practice.
Microfilming is an area where there is greater spread in which subject
bibliographers should play a decisive role during a selection phase.
Should does not mean , however, that they do play that. In some countries,
the burden of decision is on stacks staff, like in Bulgaria and in some
Russian and CIS libraries.
In Eastern Europe in the majority of cases, microfilming programmes
focus on newspapers as most endangered and bulky parts of collections. For
example, in the Czech Republic a cooperative project named Kramerius has
joined efforts with 4 libraries (under the leadership of the NL) for
microfilming 18 dailies.
In Latvia the project "Heritage-1" ("Mantojums-1') is aimed at
microfilming rare Latvian regional newspapers available only in the
National and Academic Libraries. In Russia , rare regional newspapers are
being microfilmed (Eparchialnyie and Gubernskiie Vedomosty from Tula,
Tver, Vladimir). Also current regional dailies from 7 regions are being
microfilmed by Rusian agency "Repronics".
Mass deacidification has not become a mass treatment due to economic
constraints. Therefore no examples on selection can be given. But once
Eastern Europe recovers from the economic crises this strategy will pose
specific selection questions to managers of collections.
Even with this surface examination of the selection practices from
several libraries in Eastern Europe and CIS countries, makes me think that
the efficency of selection in collection management is a hard issue to
tackle. Ensuring long term accessability of relevant collections in future
requires creating current reliable mechanisms that will enable an
institution to have the best possible collection today and in the future.
A whole array of already existing techniques like the conspectus,
evaluation of user demands and usage of acquired and required documents,
collections duplications studies, collection's preservation identification
surveys have to be included into a planning process to identify those
parts of collections or even entire collections that may be preserved with
the help of mass preservation methods. My own view on the use of these
techniques in Eastern Europe is that they should be used more intensively
and if when used be applied more consistently in making preservation
decisions. Additionally, they should be used in consultation with staff
responsible for developing current collections.
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