"Difficult Choices:" How Can Scholars Help Save Endangered Research Resources?

This report caps an 8-year initiative that has had as its goal the recruitment and formation of scholarly committees to investigate the state of decay and preservation of collections within their separate disciplines. The Commission began to investigate strategies for preservation selection in 1988. By 1995, the Commission had worked with scholars in six fields, forming scholarly advisory committees in history, art history, medieval studies, modern languages, and literature, philosophy, and Renaissance studies. Scholars in additional fields, including some of the sciences, have also been included through an interdisciplinary task force on the special problems for preserving research materials containing texts linked with images. At least two broad themes emerge in this report: the understandable reluctance of scholars to make choices because of the unpredictability of research needs, and the advisability of collaborative, cross-institutional preservation. Based on the committees' work, the report suggests that a preferred option is for the Commission to work with scholarly associations in order to take leadership responsibility for preserving materials of priority importance for their fields. These committees could also bear responsibility for promoting the preservation of its field's most important research materials, address the question of which library materials should have priority for digitization, and promote the creation of a register of library materials that have been or are being digitized. The report also contains appendices providing a bibliography of published preservation guidance, and a list of committee membership