Preservation as Conversation

Recorded knowledge is as fragile as the medium
on which it is recorded and as enduring
as the human resolve to transmit it.
– Abby Smith

One of the most enduring & difficult tasks of cultural custodians is the preservation of the many objects created over time in nearly any given space. These objects range from prehistoric collections to items based upon the latest cutting edge technologies. Some of these items are not even items in of themselves but exist in virtual or digital environments far different from the family photo album or dinosaur bone display in the local natural history museum. What all of these items have in common are their status as conduits of information and their inevitable deterioration. What can be done to stave off the eventual demise of our historical artifacts so as to ensure their enjoyment & use by future generations? The simple answer would be to save the items we want most the best we can as if running from a burning house. This begs the question: What is preservation and what does the act of preservation entail? Items, as conduits of information, demand attention; information, in turn, serves to create a dialogue in of and outside itself. Much like jazz since the early 1940s, beginning with the radicalism of cool & bebop jazz, preservation involves the interaction of various particular conversations in a marketplace of ideas. Bebop jazz, the great break away from the claustrophobic big band dance scene, involved an intuitive sense of improvisation in which the musicians, the instruments and, ultimately, the melodies, chordal progressions & rhythms conversed with each other note by note. Similarly, preservation involves the conversations of items (as conduits of information, be they words, images or marks on the treble clef) on its very own stage, the library, archive, and museum, even the family home. The use of the space in which the stage is set and who frequents that space also plays a tremendous role in how we think of preservation in the same way one considers enjoying a kid’s jazz recital in the school auditorium or checking out the unknown talent at the local dive bar. For some jazz is an immediate love, for others an acquired taste and others still it is something to be avoided; preservation is no different in that some recognize its importance in the scheme of things readily, others require a little education & convincing and the remainder choose to be ignorant or unconcerned. If preservation is a kind of dialogue, then what are its constituent parts and how is preservation done?

It is commonly understood that preservation is the caretaking of items so as to extend the time in which they can be utilized. What is not as easily comprehended involves the rate of deterioration of items as well as the steps involved in the preservation of a collection. Most people only concern themselves with access to a particular item; this line of thinking is a good place to start. When considering objects in libraries (footnote one!), archives, museums and other locations of similar nature, the first concern lies with an object’s value. How a particular item contributes to a collection, an institution’s goals or its value as resource influences the attention it will get in terms of money & time put forth to ensure its life expectancy. In a more specific instance, an item of value that suffers from some kind of disrepair would require personal attention; however, this practice, known as conservation and/or restoration, is both time- and money-consuming. Often involving improvisation upon established standards, conservation and restoration, holistically necessary components of preservation, only serve individual items and sometimes may result in cause more harm than good as they involve direct interaction with the item in question. As improvisation plays a part of jazz on the whole, conservation & restoration can only be considered aspects of the whole. While preservation involves the repair of items, it is best described as a preventive practice aimed at postponing the eventual decay of collections as a whole.

As collections grow larger each day, the necessity of practical comprehensive methods increases. Employing preservation, aside from the aforementioned physical tasks, means considering the logistical concerns like financial issues, proper staff management & training and policy making. Returning to the idea that preservation is like jazz performed in a given space, we can make the scene. Just as a jazz club would have tables, chairs, a stage, a bar, bathrooms and other features conducive to a performance, a library will have its own shelves, tables, chairs, bathrooms and other typical library features. In both instances, much consideration is given to how the space is to be used; whether it is a question of acoustics or lighting, the library and the jazz club need to have all of its components in sync in order to best serve its purposes. Preservation concerns itself with how all the constituent parts of the library & the books themselves interact, what sort of dialogue do they carry on and what final product comes from the coalescence of the various parts. How these parts are played shall determine the life expectancy of a collection.

Key elements of any preservation plan are environment control & building design, policymaking, education, disaster preparedness & response, storage & handling issues and the financial management of these activities. The best songs make the most of their parts in order to create a cohesive & strong whole. Preservation plans depend upon the same intricacy of weaving priorities & the unexpected in order to succeed. Environmental control & building design affect the amount of potential damage and alter the rate of inherent vice to a collection. Just as in jazz performance acoustics, lighting and even air conditioning play an important role in the end result of that performance, lighting, environmental pollutants, relative humidity and other physical considerations greatly influence a collection’s health. Education and storage & handling issues would not only help establish ways in which to keep items within collections accessible through life-extending practices but also help everyone keep a wary eye out for signs of deterioration within a collection which is not much different than teaching someone the proper way to play an instrument & watch for signs of its needing repair or tuning. The making of policy for and the fiscal concerns of a preservation program aim to establish the former elements of the program by creating standards in which to act & react to any problems a collection may suffer from; these steps require some background before they can be established and are done so by surveys and disaster preparedness & response. The putting together of jazz show involves players, instruments, an audience and money; a preservation plan shares these things but for both the bottom line (in order to get things going at all) is money and the safeguarding of the money-making element, which in the case of a library is its collection.

Surveys, disaster preparedness and the need for guaranteeing a collection’s accessibility & longevity depends greatly upon both the creation of the items that will find themselves in a collection and the availability of an item in a collection in a format conducive to regular or safe use. Besides the obvious tasks of rehousing or conserving/restoring items, reformatting is an essential task in preservation. Early jazz preserved its traditions and songs through incorporation into new songs, styles, genres and eventually as recordings. But people and recordings come & go, so preservation as a system of ensuring the future access to culturally significant artifacts considers the many avenues in which to make such artifacts available even after their loss. The ways in which to employ the necessary stewarding of history vary from microfilm to replicas/copies to digital formats (footnote 2!). Another key component is the making of the various mediums containing information requiring preservation. Just as the advent of recording, amplifiers and even racial integration made jazz more accessible to the public, better paper-, film- and other item-making processes have improved with the idea of their longevity in mind.

Jazz and preservation rely on a range of elements in order to succeed in of themselves; any faltering in part affects the whole and degrades what aims to be a whole. Both have had profound influences in the respective spheres and continue to challenge & preserve the way we understand these spheres, be they music or culture or history or ourselves. Thinking of preservation as a conversation among elementary portions of a grand scheme, we can better serve the interests of users, the collection and culture in general for information is useless & without value if it is not communicated & maintained. Preservation and jazz in the end share the roots of an intertwining of established notions & improvised notes and the common goal of keeping the zeitgeist talking.

footnote uno: From this point the library will serve as the prototypical example.
second footnote: Digital formats and films may be copied but are dependent on machines which carry their own inherent vices besides the artifacts’ own; a particular advantage of digital imaging & formatting is the ease of making “perfect” copies and their being code, which takes up virtual space and leaving actual space for other items.