Building Capacity

Since preservation programs are driven by a variety of mechanisms, staff need to be trained and educated. This section discusses a number of issues relating to training and education. It also suggests that some effort be made to share the preservation load by seeking to collaborate with other institutions in developing programs.

All libraries face the problem of controlling collection growth. Large collections make the task of preservation more difficult. Given the growth in the number of materials published every year, lack of storage space threatens to become worse.

Research libraries build collections to serve the research and teaching needs of their respective institutions, thus the larger the pool of available resources the better. But even though more titles are published in electronic form every year, there seems to be no slackening in the production of paper and print. Because acquisitions budgets grow much more slowly than the cost of new publications, individual libraries actually cover less of their dedicated subject areas while acquiring more titles and running out of space.