70 · Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
Islamic Studies/Middle Eastern Studies: Costly digitization. Copyright issues related to digitization (difficulty ascertaining
country copyright laws). Slavic &East European studies: 1) Age of collection =larger presence of acidic papers.
Monitoring of collections of growing importance, as is seeking out digital or film surrogates. 2) Need to use remote
offsite storage makes monitoring collection condition more labor-intensive, as materials are not grouped by subject in
high-density.
Lack of a full preservation unit. Need for a Digital Preservation program. To be discussed in coming fiscal year. Budget.
Lack of dedicated staff—We recently received funding to endow a conservation and preservation curatorship. Need
for collection condition surveys—With the hiring of the curator, we have initiated surveys that are now underway.
Environmental storage conditions—Facilities with proper environmental controls are in planning stage.
Lack of funding source for digital projects, lack of staff/equipment/expertise for digital projects—More shifts in
collection and personnel to these areas.
Lack of local preservation expertise that leads to outsourcing. Lack of space for storing and preserving rare materials.
Lack of sufficient software to create digital archives. Lack of appropriate environmental space to house fragile
collections.
Limited expertise to select, manage, and catalog these collections. Poor (physical) quality and ephemeral publications.
Brittle paper and weak bindings make this material especially costly and labor-intensive to scan and manage generally.
Current publications from Western Europe, Japan, and Israel tend to be on good to excellent paper and published in
well-made books. Not all global resources are problematic. Reformatting is a near universal strategy for our global
collections.
Limited resources to support digital projects and limited capacity for digitization. Very large, historical print collections
so the needs are quite extensive. We work with CRL and other projects to pursue preservation some targeted funds for
deacidification have been available offsite storage provides better climate and security conditions that can buy more
time for print materials.
Non-US incoming collections, including gifts, have higher rate of preservation problems such as acidic paper, weak
bindings, etc. Our solution implemented many years ago is to have all incoming collections assessed by the cataloger
and/or marking unit. Any items needing treatment are treated before sending to the shelf. Web captures—We have
a subscription to ArchiveIt, a service developed by the Internet Archive, and we use it to crawl and archive selected
websites of the University of Iowa International Writers Program alumni. Items published on acidic paper—Newly
acquired acidic South Asian English language books are sent out for mass deacidification. Due to budget constraints,
this is the only subject area that receives this treatment.
Not enough time Not enough expertise Not enough funding. Need to educate colleagues on importance of
preservation. Collaboration with Library Systems Information Technology and Digital Initiatives is critical. New recruits
are preparing plans to deal with the challenges.
Nothing unique to global resources/area studies.
Poor binding structures (rebind as needed), plus the larger challenges of identifying and acquiring global resources,
especially grey literature, so that we can get the resources into workflows that incorporate routine preservation review,
and region-specific formats for resources, particularly videotape (purchasing multi-format playback units for access and
to use in digital reformatting).
Preservation of most electronic resources remains a challenge.
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