| Abstract: | CONCLUSION. Although the initial impetus envisioned a national strategy, it was evident from the Commission's inception that an international context for preservation must underlie all our assumptions and activities. This serious cultural crisis calls for unprecedented cooperative action within a global context to preserve the human record of our respective cultures. This is not just rhetoric: In the course of my work for the Commission, I have visited library and archives in many countries on several continents, and each visit provided depressingly familiar sights of deteriorating library and archival collections. The magnitude of the cost, the scope of the required preservation effort, and the urgency of the crisis are such that no one institution, or, indeed, no single country can hope to succeed alone. Too often, the competing pressures on our institutional budgets pit the past against the present and the future. Only through creative cooperative programs on an international scale can we afford the heavy cost of preserving our intellectual heritage while, at the same time, continuing to build our print collections and open up new avenues to knowledge in electronic format (avoiding the creation of a future preservation problem of gigantic proportions). Each country can learn from the experience of others, when one of us loses valuable historical documents, we all lose. With the benefits of the new communications technologies, when one of us saves an embrittled document, we all gain access to that knowledge. |
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