Preservation and Access: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Abstract

The number of conferences, meetings and publications on digital and electronic information over the past years has increased exponentially. Digital records seem to replace to a large extent the classical paper collections and paper records, and concern about availability and accessibility of paper material seem to vanish in the shining light of the explosion of present day’s electronic communication and digitization developments.

Let us bring in some realism. In a recent interview in Der Spiegel Klaus Dieter Lehmann, the director of the Deutsche Bibliothek, the German deposit library, mentioned under the appropriate heading Books do have advantages” that of the 300.000 acquisitions per year only 2-3000, that is less than 1%, are in digital form. It is obvious that if such a large proportion of large libraries is still in paper format concern for this type of material does not reflect a quaint preference for an old fashioned and outdated medium.

An organization which is concerned with the preservation and acccess of our collective memory in all its forms is the European Commission on Preservation and Access, and it is a privilege for me as its chairman to present to the conference the aims and objectives and some of the past and future activites of this commission. The ECPA was established in 1994 by a group of librarians, archivists and scholars out of concern for the fate of millions of books and documents threatened by acidification and embrittlement in Europe.