{"id":669,"date":"2011-03-14T23:27:01","date_gmt":"2011-03-14T12:27:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stumblingpast.wordpress.com\/?p=669"},"modified":"2022-08-04T00:24:44","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:24:44","slug":"history-without-the-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2011\/03\/14\/history-without-the-book\/","title":{"rendered":"History Without the Book???"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Room<\/a>
In the midst of my research in the reading room at the University of Wollongong Archives.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

People worry about the ephemeral nature of information on the internet.\u00a0 Web pages are easy to create and just as easy to remove or alter.\u00a0 Many prefer to refer to a hard copy of a book because they believe that it will be accessible for longer than information found on the internet.<\/p>\n

But the book is not an inviolable object.\u00a0 It can be destroyed by disaster, carelessness and by a deliberate act.\u00a0 Recently the Sydney Morning Herald<\/a> drew attention to the destruction of thousands of old books, journals and newspapers by the University of New South Wales.\u00a0 Unfortunately the library’s response<\/a> does not seem to have had much publicity.\u00a0 The library states,<\/p>\n

Where duplicate copies are discarded, at least one copy is left on the shelves so the knowledge contained in the book is still available.<\/p>\n

Andrew Well, University Librarian, University of New South Wales, ‘Statement on Collection Management’<\/a>, <\/em>16\/3\/2011<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nowhere in this statement or in the library’s ‘Collection Development Policy’<\/a> is there any reference to removing all copies of certain books unless the library holds the last copy in Australia as suggested in the Sydney Morning Herald article.\u00a0 I will leave this discrepancy for others to address.\u00a0 My aim here is to explore the broader issue of the pressures faced by archives and libraries around Australia to balance retaining material for posterity versus the inevitable difficulties posed by funding and storage constraints.<\/p>\n

I have just finished another period of intense archival work, visiting three archives in two states.\u00a0 I am reminded of the parlous existence of archives and libraries whenever I visit them.\u00a0 At several archives I have visited over the last year I could see the strain that archivists are under trying to defend their collections from destruction due to poor storage conditions or the desire of management to use some of the space taken by the library for other purposes.<\/p>\n

While the University of New South Wales library has made an effort to ensure that they retain at least one copy of a book on the shelves I have been confronted by the damage caused by the wholesale disposal of books at other libraries in the past.\u00a0 Over the years a collection may have been physically moved from one building to another.\u00a0 It is much easier to cull books than to move them.\u00a0 Where the archive is held by a university, they have at times been visited by lecturers who tell the librarian to remove all old textbooks off the shelves because they do not want their students to be reading superseded, discredited material.\u00a0 Yet these textbooks are valuable for historians as they give us insight into what was accepted wisdom of a discipline in the past.\u00a0 I was pleased to note that the University of New South Wales library retains one copy of old textbooks.<\/p>\n

Our research focuses on how student teachers were taught to teach reading and how school children were actually taught to read in the classroom.\u00a0 We may not want our current student teachers to practice what is suggested in these old education texts, but they are significant because they shaped the learning of not just a group of student teachers in the past, but an entire generation of school students.<\/p>\n

Clearly books will not last forever.\u00a0 It is important that we secure them as much as possible.\u00a0 However, we have to be practical at the same time and recognise that there is a cost to storage. Kristen Thornton, the curator and librarian who manages Deakin University’s impressive Australian Schools Textbook Collection<\/a> has helped me understand the issues and processes that libraries work through when negotiating the difficult balance between the need to preserve books and manage the costs of doing so. “Weeding collections is a big issue everywhere,” commented Kristen. She told me about a repository of low-circulation books in Melbourne called CARM<\/a>.\u00a0 Participating libraries can move low-use books to this facility and patrons can access them through inter-library loan.\u00a0 The catalogue is accessible through Libraries Australia<\/a>, Trove <\/a>or directly from the organisation itself<\/a>.\u00a0 The University of New South Wales is one of the libraries that contributes to CARM<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those working in the digital world are well aware of the need for multiple backups for critical data and how essential it is that these backups are stored in more than one location.\u00a0 Books are critical data for our culture and society.\u00a0 We need multiple backups for books.\u00a0 But in the case of books the strongest type of backup policy will be one that supports backups on a variety of media.\u00a0 We need to preserve a limited number of physical copies of the book, but the security of the book is enhanced markedly when we also store electronic copies of books.\u00a0 Automatically this type of multi-media backup will ensure that backups are stored at different locations. Digitisation improves accessibility on a scale that physical holdings of books cannot.<\/p>\n

The number of old books held by libraries is going to decline as storage costs rise and the number of books that have been digitised increases. Yet while digitisation helps to reduce the storage costs faced by libraries, it is not free.\u00a0 The bottom line is that sustained funding for digitisation plus ongoing funding for the physical collection of libraries is vital.\u00a0 We need to both digitise and retain copies of books.\u00a0 One without the other makes a book more vulnerable to destruction.<\/p>\n

I always return to my responsibility in all this.\u00a0 Historians, whether academic, amateur or in between need to be at the frontline of publicising good collections and defending them.\u00a0 How can we do our research without books?\u00a0 Archivists have told me that they would appreciate a copy of receiving a copy of any article or paper delivered that relies on information provided by their archive.\u00a0 This is the evidence they need to demonstrate to the organisations that they are dependent on for space and funding that the archive is regarded as historically significant and therefore should be nurtured.\u00a0 But I think we can do more than this.\u00a0 We should be using social media to tell the world about any archive or library that we find helpful for our research.\u00a0 We should join archivists and librarians in their efforts to preserve their collections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently we heard that the library at University of New South Wales were discarding many old books. Every library has to confront the issue of the storage costs of books and the importance of preserving books. How does the principle of multiple backups stored at different locations apply when libraries are facing tight budgets? What can we, who use these collections, do to help?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13,27],"tags":[43,81,104,106,120,139,182,191],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Yvonne Perkins","author_link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/author\/yvonne\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7226,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions\/7226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}