Preserving Our Heritage: Perspectives from Antiquity to the Digital Age

Drawing on historical texts, this all-encompassing, accessible volume provides a comprehensive understanding of preservation for librarians, archivists, and museum specialists. By grounding key readings in context, Michele V. Cloonan offers students and professionals an overview of longevity, reversibility, enduring value, and authenticity of information preservation. In considering the history and context of preservation, she provides significant insight into conservation, historic preservation, moving images, and other cultural heritage institutions. The text is divided into eight themes designed to provide specific readings in context with this broad subject. - History and Context: Situating Preservation; - Collections; - Digital Preservation; - Scholarship; - Public Policy; - Ethics and Values; - Multicultural Issues; - Sustainability. Each section has historical works that form the basis of contemporary thinking and practices, readings from a variety of fields that are primarily concerned with the preservation of cultural heritage, and hard-to-find publications that shed new light on how to approach contemporary problems. Cloonan's selections and her insightful commentary on each comprise a truly global view of preservation. Readership: Students and researchers in archives, museums and libraries courses around the world.