On the Need to Preserve

Once a week I go to the local historical society and volunteer for an hour, usually working among the shelves of books helping to organize and index what is there. Lately I worked with several shelves of genealogy and history periodicals dating from the early 1920s through the 2000s. 

Due to years of being stored in non-archival conditions, the earliest volumes, and even those from the 1960s and 1970s, are deteriorating. The paper is dry, the bindings fragile, and there is definitely evidence of insect and mouse damage. While the journals are not completely focused on the society's local and state focus, they are important to preserve in an accessible manner. 

The questions remain:

• What do we do with books and items that may prove useful at some point in time?
• How long do we keep items which will deteriorate over time, such as periodicals, newspapers, and paperback books?
• If another repository has a copy of an item, should we also have one?

If storage space was unlimited and money not an object, then we could keep everything for all time.