I owe many of my favorite ideas about library preservation assessment to birds and trash. I have a friend who does ornithological research into the effects of habitat development and disturbance on breeding shorebirds, specifically the changing relationship between humans and arctic shorebirds in response to a new landfill in Barrow, Alaska. Birds being generally more migratory and less long-lived than library books, his methodologies for data collection and analysis have always been more agile than mine.
It was only natural to think of him when I happened across a copy of Sokal and Rohlf‘s Introduction to Biostatistics at the Strand a while back. I snapped it up immediately, and it’s turned out to be an enjoyable way to brush up my statistics. One of the reasons that I like biological analogies is the necessity of considering change over time in biological processes. Put another way, biology and preservation are both concerned with the developments of the relationship between inherent and environmental factors. Indeed, the role of “inherent vice” is one of the earliest theoretical models for preservation, even though the term has been deprecated in favor of a permanence/durability model. Sokal and Rohlf make a very powerful observation as they introduce their ideas of biostatistics: