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This site was frozen in 2004 and is now out of date. Please go to RLG's current Web site for all information. Questions? Contact us. |
RLG and Preservation
Long-term Retention of Traditional Research Materials
Please go to the new web page at http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=571.
Preservation has been a central focus of RLG since four large research institutions founded the organization in the early 1970s. For over 20 years RLG has pursued an aggressive agenda to harness and apply the power of collaborative problem-solving to support institutions in their efforts to preserve and improve access to endangered research materials. Initially the focus of the preservation community—called PRESERV in the 1990s—was on material in traditional collections.
Accomplishments in brittle materials preservation
Achievements in providing operational capacity and expertise in brittle books reformatting were made possible by the efforts of energetic RLG members, generous grants from a number of US charitable foundations, and, especially, support and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities' Division of Preservation and Access. Milestones include:
- Consensus on technical and procedural guidelines for the production of stable, long-lived, high-quality, preservation microfilm;
- Creation of preservation master negatives (35mm microfilm) for over 145,000 monograph and serial volumes (1982-1995);
- Creation of preservation master negatives (35mm microfilm) for 1,200 linear feet of archival and manuscript collections;
- Training in management of preservation microfilming projects and instructional workshops in quality control;
- Publication of guidelines for microfilming books/serials and archives/manuscripts:
- Establishment and management of a shared storage facility for master negatives. RLG continues to coordinate a shared storage facility at Iron Mountain/National Underground Storage, Inc. for long-term storage of microfilm masters; RLG members are welcome to store master negative film roles in this facility at advantageous rates. Many of the masters stored at National Underground Storage were created in a series of collaborative RLG microfilming projects carried out in the 1980s-1990s.
In 2001-2002, the Projeto Cooperativo Conservação em Bibliotecas e Arquivos, with funding from the Mellon Foundation and the Brazilian Vitae Foundation, translated the RLG Archives Microfilming Manual into Portuguese and distributed copies to 1,800 institutions throughout Brazil. The Manual do RLG para Microfilmagem de Documentos (publication Nr. 53) is available at no charge from www.cpba.net.
Beyond brittle materials
RLG's preservation community has honed the collaborative process. Participants identify a difficult problem; apply their expertise to creating solutions, sometimes including a proof-of-concept project; develop operational capacity; and disseminate and promulgate solutions. Then, on to the next problem, building each solution on the last.
RLG's current, multipart initiative for long-term retention of digital research materials builds on a number of digital imaging/preservation publications and tools produced as part of the PRESERV program. The following exemplify some of the late-1990s preservation community work.
- Recommendations for RLG digital archiving efforts: working group report (1998)
- Recommended preservation metadata elements for digital master files: working group report (1998)
- "Managing Digital Imaging Project" workshops (1998-99)
- Recording bibliographic information for digitally reformatted files: working group recommendation; adopted for the MARC21 format (1998-99)
Find more at the digital preservation initiative home page.
Last updated 3 February 2003
This site was frozen in 2004 and is now out of date. Please go to RLG's current Web site for all information. Questions? Contact us.
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