Op Ed — Our History Is Disappearing Under Our Noses - Literally! A Proactive Approach to Circumvent a Failing Preservation Technology

摘要

I have spent my entire professional life — more than a couple of decades now — focusing on preservation, archiving materials, and ensuring access to library collections. With this unique focus comes an unusual perspective, one resulting from having watched as issues around preservation have emerged, and re-emerged. Just as the library community once observed the preservation problems with acidic paper (resulting in innovations around acid-free paper), we are now seeing problems with a preservation medium that emerged in the late 1920s and was still in use as recently as the mid-1970s: acetate-based microfilm.