Archival preservation in the United States and the role of information sources.

Preservation is a fundamental management function for archivists, librarians, curators, history professionals and others with responsibility for acquiring and making available the record of human activity. The study investigates the extent to which there is a relationship between preservation practice and the perceived availability and usefulness of information sources that recommend appropriate preservation actions. The analysis begins with a synthesis of ideas about preservation as a management function and explores how these ideas have evolved over the past decade among leading preservation experts in libraries and archives. This synthesis forms the basis for the development of an original working definition of archival preservation and of a model preservation program. The model organizes a wide range of recommended prevention and renewal activities in a schema that distinguishes between planning actions and implementation actions. Data from a mail survey of 320 institutions that enrolled staff in basic preservation workshops offered by the Society of American Archivists were used to construct a series of four measures of accomplishment in preservation programming, four measures of the perceptions of information sources, and two measures of the size of archival administrative units. Correlation coefficients for each pair of measures were calculated to examine the strength and significance of the relationships. The findings confirm the impression of preservation experts that the number of staff of a repository and its ability to implement preservation programs are strongly related. The analysis also identifies a relatively significant positive relationship between prevention planning activities and both renewal and prevention implementation activities. Finally, the correlation coefficients point toward the importance of personalized written and oral sources of information in the development of preservation implementation actions.Ph.D.Communication and the ArtsLibrary scienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128805/2/9208522.pd