Do You Count? The Revitalization of a National Preservation Statistics Survey
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.60n1.38Abstract
The American Library Association (ALA) Preservation Statistics Survey, a national survey on the preservation activities of cultural heritage institutions, was introduced in 2012 in response to the decision of the Association of Research Libraries’ (ARL) decision to discontinue its long-running preservation statistics program. This paper presents the history of both surveys, discusses the rationale for collecting national data on these activities, and how the data has been used. The paper also includes key results, derived from analysis of both surveys. The surveys suggest that institutional support for preservation activities has declined significantly since its peak in the early 1990s. Preservation programs continue to focus on text-based materials and seem to employ fewer nonprofessional staff than they did five years earlier. The benefits and challenges of conducting a voluntary national survey are also discussed.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) after it has been accepted for publication. Sharing can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
