In December 1996, Brown was awarded a National Endowment for the
Humanities Challenge Grant of $625,000 for Preservation. The challenge
was to raise $2.5 million. Through a great deal of hard work by
the Development Office, the goal was met and a Preservation Endowment
was created. As a result, a Preservation Librarian, responsible
for planning the expenditure of each yearís income on preservation
treatments, was hired.
Treatment options that have been used so far include deacidification,
book repair and conservation, rehousing materials in protective
containers, and reformatting items and creating preservation facsimiles.
In the future, digitization may also be considered a preservation
option. It is the Libraryís practice to retain original materials
whenever possible. If books or journals deteriorate to the point
where they can no longer be used without causing them harm, a surrogate
is created and the originals are boxed and stored.
Since this was an NEH-created endowment, humanities materials are
targeted for treatment. This is broadly interpreted to include collections
in the Rockefeller, John Hay, Orwig, Art Slide, Media, and Demography
libraries. The grant also identified eight collections of strength
which will receive particular attention: Old World Art and Archaeology,
Music and Ethnomusicology, Ancient Studies and Classics, the Harris
Collection of American Poetry and Plays, History of Mathematics,
the H. P. Lovecraft Collection, Egyptology, and the McLellan Lincoln
Collection. Also, the endowment affords us the opportunity to expand
the current practice of caring for the existing collections to surveying
and treating incoming materials. Options like deacidification have
the greatest impact when performed as early in the life of the book
as possible.
The NEH Preservation Assistant will periodically conduct the surveys
to measure the effects of our efforts, track statistics, and provide
other administrative support for endowment activities. As the evidence
of the long-term benefits of our preservation activity grows, the
program will become a model for other major institutions. The dual-action
approach of treating new, as well as retrospective, materials, and
our being flexible enough to incorporate technologies not yet fully
developed, provides us with the opportunity to form a program that
is prepared to meet the preservation challenges of the 21st Century.
- Whitney Pape
http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/University_Library
