Who Wants Yesterday's Papers? Essays on the Research Value of Printed Materials in the Digital Age

Citation

Lee Eden, B. (2006), "Who Wants Yesterday's Papers? Essays on the Research Value of Printed Materials in the Digital Age", Collection Building, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 100-100. https://doi.org/10.1108/01604950610677576

This book looks at a number of questions: “Should librarians attempt to save everything that is published? If so, then in what formats? And what do scholars and researchers think about these issues, and in what way should their viewpoints and opinions be taken into account?” These issues and questions were discussed at a conference organized by librarians at the University of Maryland Libraries and students in their College of Information Studies in March 2002.

The book is divided into four sections, following the order of the symposium. The first section contains two papers, one that provides historical perspective regarding the title of the book and the collective anxiety that librarians feel regarding the destruction of the written record, and the other on how historical preservation has developed in the last 60 years and future directions for the field. The second section has five papers by University of Maryland professors, contemplating the importance of original paper documents to their research. These include a historian who needs access to science textbooks that are rarely preserved, a journalism professor who finds digitized and filmed newspapers leave much to be desired, an English professor who explains how original printed documents are important to the study of Shelley, two physics professors who share information on the fast‐paced world of publishing in the sciences, and another English professor who works with digital publications as well as original artifacts.

The third section contains seven articles from invited professionals with varied expertise and experience in the area of preservation and preservation techniques. This section includes an article by Walter Cybulski, well known from his articulation and response to Nicholson Baker's critique of microfilm for preserving newspapers, and a number of articles by various conservators, collectors and scholars. Finally, the last section has two articles from the archivists' perspective, focusing on assessing value and meaning in relation to what should and should not be saved. Richard J. Cox provides an afterword to the book.

Overall, this is a very interesting and organized contemplation on the issues surrounding the preservation of printed materials.

Bradford Lee Eden

University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA