SPEC Kit 324: Collecting Global Resources · 71
Preserving these resources has not been a special concern and they are treated in the same way as other resources, e.g.,
rebind as necessary.
Professional time, budget, space.
Rights management (determining copyright). Measures taken: Educating ourselves, becoming more informed. Privacy
issues (subjects, authors, and donors and all families involved). Measures taken: Creating mechanisms to restrict access
when appropriate. Time and staff. Measures taken: setting priorities.
Shelf space is limited, with no prospect for major construction. When we are able to secure reliable perpetual digital
access rights, we withdraw materials such as journal backfiles (JSTOR, PAO) in order to free up space for materials for
which no digital counterpart exists. Obviously, this approach assumes a high level of confidence in digital archives,
hence our support of initiatives such as LOCKSS and Portico.
Some digitization (including some brittle items) in the UF Digital Collection.
Staffing, staffing, training new technologies.
The challenges are not really different from other collections.
There isn’t sufficient staffing or staff time to give the attention needed for a more complete preservation effort. Again,
we do what we can.
These materials need additional resources just to stabilize. For example, all stab bindings must be placed in pocket
pamphlets or four-flap wrappers just so that they can be safely placed on the shelves. And many of our global resources
come from places where the paper and binding quality are poor. So we may need to rebind materials or place them in
protective enclosures before they even go to the shelf. We factor this into our workflows and budget requests. We are
also working on retroactively stabilizing some global collections, such as the prayer scrolls in the Tibetan collections. We
are outsourcing some boxing that will allow safer handling of these unusual formats.
Through joining HathiTrust (early 2011) we expect to have added a conduit for preserving some of our older, uniquely
held, and deteriorating international studies print materials over time. Newspaper preservation is a serious issue.
Climate conditions in many world regions speed deterioration of newsprint, and in some areas direct collaboration with
publishers on preservation has been blocked by exclusive commercial licensing agreements that result in no product.
UW is a member of nearly all of the CRL microform/digitization projects for various world regions, which goes a small
way toward addressing the problem. Broad-based collaborative efforts now underway (e.g., for Southeast Asia and
Slavic studies, among others) are trying to negotiate inclusion of international subscriptions in preservation depositories
such as LOCKSS and PORTICO.
We had a very active preservation program that collaborated well with the area studies librarians until recently. We
worked cooperatively to de-acidify materials, to find grants to microfilm and digitize. Areas of concentration are now
digitization, but these are spun not so much to preserve as to facilitate access.
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