The UCLA Library is one of the nation’s great academic libraries. Its collection of more than 8.5 million cataloged items supports the work of one of our greatest universities, with UCLA ranked at or near the top of almost any metric you could choose. Along with core collections supporting the research and instruction of thousands of students, faculty, staff and community members, it is filled with wonders. The UCLA Library’s special collections have done any number of singular and incredible things – flown on the space shuttle, strutted down the red carpet, or launched a revolution – and together, they are witnesses to the entire course of recorded history.
Despite all that, the UCLA Library had very little in the way of preservation support over the first century of its existence. In 1984 UCLA participated in the University of California Preservation Implementation Program. This lead to a collection survey and the appointment of a preservation administrator, Christopher Coleman. The Preservation Imaging Unit of the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF) was founded in the 1980s to offer preservation reformatting to both UCLA and other UC campuses. However, the immediate pressures of budget cuts and rapidly changing library service needs led to a reduction of preservation efforts over the course of the next 20 years. The preservation administrator’s role was diminished and combined with other job duties. Primary collections care activities were carried on within individual library units with real dedication, but minimal coordination and oversight.
University Librarian Gary Strong arrived at UCLA in 2003 and made preservation a priority. With support from the Mellon Foundation, the Library established its first centralized conservation laboratory and hired its first conservator. During the development and implementation of the 2006-09 UCLA Library Strategic Plan, the establishment of a Preservation Program was a clearly articulated priority. In support of this, the hiring of a Preservation Officer was approved. I joined the UCLA Library in that role in June 2009, and I’m pleased to share these initial observations on the course of preservation at the UCLA Library. We are a few years away from having the whole preservation program in place at UCLA Library but several themes have emerged that, taken together, suggest how preservation will serve as a key function of the 21st-century research library.
Supporting daily operations
Like all research libraries, UCLA Library finds itself in transition as we build a digital library around the print- and placed-based functions that have evolved since we opened our doors as the library of the Los Angeles State Normal School, on August 29, 1882. The most important characteristic of the way we are doing our work in 2009 is that formal project administation processes, knowledge management systems, and business continuity planning methods have emerged as tools that helps us navigate this transition. This way of doing business, sometimes called evidence-based practice, involves setting standards or performance targets and then collecting data to appraise and audit our efforts.
This adds an administrative burden to the overall work of the library, and it feels like a constraint compared to less structures systems. It is important to work through that initial impression of restriction though. The constraint is the same constraint a composer feels when they make the transition from humming a tune to working out a sonata for a string quartet. Ultimately, the form gives us the freedom we need in order to experiment and find the best way to achieve our goals. These planning methodologies have allowed us to find mutually beneficial solutions to problems that have traditionally placed preservation efforts, budget constraints, and institutional priorities in conflict.
Environmental control offers one illustration of this approach, as we attempt to be good stewards of our intellectual, capital, financial, and natural resources. Traditional environmental control efforts focus on creating cool, dry environments through intensive use of cooling and dehumidification, often at an extremely high energy cost. Blanket requirements for temperature and relative humidity were set without regard to the actual capabilities of the mechanical plant. Staff had the alternatives of the reasonable approach of giving up on achieving the impossible, and settling for merely non-destructive conditions, or the heroicly fatalistic approach of laboring on without sucess. This can build a certain sort of fellow feeling through comiseration, but it precludes building geuine professional camraderie around cooperative sucesss.
In evidence based practice at UCLA, to achieve these types of results, we start our environmental planning outside, by looking for prevailing weather conditions that provide beneficial environments for free. By understanding those conditions, we can develop the framework in which modifications are made to address specific collection environments, such as public stacks, special collections, or long-term storage. This allows our facilities engineers to work on clearly scoped problems, such as controlling humidity, or achieving a specific decrease in temperature at a certain time of the year. This makes it much easier to develop energy-efficient solutions that still meet collection needs. Despite the dire shortage of cold weather in sunny Los Angeles, our first pilot project in a special collections storage area increased our preservation index by over 10% while saving around $5,000 in energy costs. We hope to increase these savings by an order of magnitude, at least, as we develop optimizations for the rest of the Library.
Library binding, traditionally decentralized at UCLA Library, is also changing as we make preservation an integral part of operations. Our collections survey data suggests that by the time most items show significant wear and tear, the items have already been moved to the SRLF due to our overriding space management concerns. Conditions in the SRLF dramatically reduce handling and environmental decay. As we centralize our bindery operations, we are ramping up a “shelf-worthy” initiative that passes materials directly into the stacks as long as they meet a basic set of physical criteria, regardless of whether they are serials or monographs. On the intake side, if it’s ready for the shelf, to the shelf it goes. On the circulation side, if an item is damaged, it goes for treatment.
Reducing our prospective binding will create an increase in repair work over time, but the net effect is to free up resources for the repair of circulating materials and preservation services for collections of all types. This is a fairly simple lean management stretegy, shifitng work to a “just in time” rather than “just in case” approach. It lets us manage our demand for binding services in a more deliberate way by focusing on the ongoing need for corrective repairs, instead of responding to unpredictable changes in serials subscriptions. In effect, we are aligning binding services more directly with local needs for printed materials throughout our collections rather than managing them as a byproduct of a serials subscription process. This is especially important as we shift to e-journal licensing at a UC system-wide level.
Promoting the artifact
Kristen St. John joined the UCLA Library in 2004, and in the last five years, her work and that of technician Wil Lin have been integrated further into regular library operations. As of 2009 the Library Conservation Center (LCC) is the heart of our new preservation program.
In the midst of all of the changes that are taking place in libraries, special collections remain a clear point of value, and we depend on our conservator to articulate the fundamental identity and value of these objects as objects. The treatment, research and analytical work performed at the LCC support exhibits, digitization efforts, and scholarly engagement with the artifacts in our care. Conservation leads us to understand the importance of our collections in ways that augment the work of our curators and catalogers. Two examples of this are the support for our large-scale digitization partnership with the Open Content Alliance (OCA) and the identification of an Armenian devotional scroll dating from 1608.
Our conservator was able to work with the OCA staff to address handling concerns for special collections materials and developed workflows that stabilize materials in a fast, reversible fashion. This has allowed us to shift our large-scale digitization efforts from essentially random “shelf-clearing” to the deliberate creation of digital versions of the UCLA Library’s unique collections. Instead of taking items off the shelf because they were possible to digitize, curators selected groups of material to place online and we treated to project as a cooperative effort and applied our conservation resources to making that project possible. Coordinating these projects added real administrative overhead, but it also created a more measurable and meanigful product. Instead of a couple hundreds things online, we have the Robert Gross Collection or the Florence Nightingale Collection, as examples of distinctive materials from UCLA Library that would not be online without the help of conservation.
Preparing the Scroll for Documentation
In a recent example of how conservation enhances our understanding of the collections themselves, the Center for Primary Research and Training uncovered an Armenian scroll in poor physical condition while looking for an item to be used as an example of the Library’s conservation needs in an upcoming video. The minimal level catalog record identified this as an Armenian scroll, with illustrations throughout, c. 19th century. As our conservator opened and reviewed the scroll, it became obvious that it is more than it initially seemed, dating to 1608, filled with fine illuminations and inscribed with several hands as the scroll was handed down through the centuries. Work on this item has drawn in colleagues from the Getty Conservation Institute and scholars of Armenian textual history, as well.
An image of the scroll is shown here, and you can view the entire object as an HD movie (n.b. it’s a large quicktime file, 1280×720 pixels, 400MB). Although this particular project is still unfurling, it is a potent reminder that conservation is an essential avenue into the networks of professional expertise that the Library exists to support. Work on the object itself, essential for its basic use, has also revealed material evidence that reshapes our understanding of what it is, revealing its age and the details of its production. Again, it is possible to avoid the overhead, unroll this scroll, and do various repairs. Arguably that is faster and easier, but that unreflective and disconnected approach misses the depth of what conservation is: not a fix-it program but a re-engagement with an artifact in our care, to ensure that we have a plan for its stewardship. That often entails a corrective treatment to address damage or deterioration, but that moment in the artifacts life is just one inflection point in a larger effort to ensure that it is better understood and more usable in the future, for description and cataloging, digitization, exhibition, or further research.
Developing digital services
UCLA Library, like many of its peers, spends about half of its materials budget on digital resources. That level of commitment, coupled with our growing awareness of these collections’ permanent research value, demands preservation involvement. At UCLA Library, we are taking the point of view that the ethics of conservation still apply, regardless of format. When we have digital content of authentic or evidentiary value, the original must remain intact. Where the value is primarily intellectual, we have options for substitutes and surrogates.
Once we have adjusted to seeing digital objects through a lens of conservation, it is easier to think about preservation management in a way that is applicable across the radically different formats we rely on. It is no accident that the risk assessment and business continuity processes that have been so helpful to our traditional preservation management strategy developed in the IT sector as a way to address the problems in maintaining 24/7 digital services.
As a first step in digital preservation, we need to have a large, secure data storage system, just as we require secure, climate-controlled storage as a first step in preservation of our print collections. The California Digital Library’s Digital Preservation Repository is helping us fill that role digitally, just as the SRLF is helping us address these issues in the physical realm.
Digital objects also require periodic assessment and repair, just like their physical counterparts. The UCLA Library is testing a number of approaches to this problem. Our LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) pilot provides a good example of how conservation questions can help us navigate digital preservation issues. Migration is occasionally required to transform an original file to a more contemporary format. LOCKSS allows for migration-on-demand, which keeps the original files intact on the server and provides a reformatted version to the user along with the original source code of any web-pages. This lets the user view a resource in a state that is as close to original as possible, something we try to achieve already in our physical conservation treatments.
Making the parts into a whole
The final step in our first year of work was the completion of a collection condition survey, the methodology and results of which we will be publishing soon. This survey methodology identifies some common elements related to the structure, damage and decay that we can quantify across our many collection formats and closely ties the data we collect to the preservation outcomes that are possible. Focusing our survey data collection on possible outcomes has helped make the survey instrument shorter and survey simpler to perform. We have stripped away almost all of the item-specific descriptive information that has traditionally been collected in preservation surveys, as well. Specific item descriptive information rarely affects collection-wide preservation planning, and in our test surveys, was the most time-consuming and inconsistent type of information that we could collect. Descriptive information is essential in the treatment of individual items, but because it must be re-assessed at the time of treatment by the individual performing that treatment, collecting it in a sampling survey resulted in a lot of effort that was low value at best, and always duplicated when an item went to treatment.
These types of changes and a close attention to outcomes has led to a survey tool that is simple to use, consistent in the data it provides across collections and formats, and a survey process that is fast enough to implement that we will be able to repeat the process every year or two as a way of auditing the state of our collections and the impact of our preservation efforts. Having completed the first pass across the entire collection, we are already gearing up to do a more focused assessment on subject collections and other subsets of our materials, so that we can spotlight particular preservation problems in our most important resources and plan to make tangible improvements in their condition.
The most important outcome of this first year is that we are developing a single language to talk about preservation of all kinds. Preservation has to speak to numerous audiences about their specific preservation issues. Using some common vocabulary for preservation helps us to give each stakeholder a little more understanding of how preservation issues play out elsewhere in the Library. With all of this said, there is still a great deal ahead of us at the UCLA Library. Unifying these parts into a whole and developing robust, sustainable programs out of these many initiatives will take a few years. We are making a lot of progress in finding ways to talk about preservation across the Library. We are only just beginning to find out how to put preservation issues into a better perspective across the UCLA Library’s timeline. With the UCLA Library preparing to create a new strategic plan in the face of a global economic crisis, managing risks and being good stewards of our resources has never been more important.
Note: Versions of this article have appeared in Archival Products News (vol. 16, no. 1) and LibraryWorks INFOcus (October 2009)