College and Research Libraries


Editorial 

COLLEGE 
& RESEARCH 

LIBRARIES 

A recent issue of Humanities (December 1980), published by the 
National Endowment for the Humanities, featured an article on conserva-
tion by Ann Russell, director of the New England Document Conserva-
tion Center. The title of the article, "The Quiet Disaster," had the usual 
Armageddon-like tone for articles on this topic. A similar article, which 
appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 30, 1978), was enti-
tled "Damage in the Stacks." 

In this issue, we present an essay that describes the Council on Library 
Resources'- long interest in and generous support for research on various 
aspects of the conservation/preservation problem. Among the impressions 
that will be left with a careful reader of this essay is that "the problem" is, 
in fact, an apparently infinite complex of many discrete problems-of 
physical chemistry, of lighting design, of environmental pollution and con-
trol, of engineering, and so forth. 

Given our success as a profession in shaping the technology of comput-
ing (hardware and software) to resolve problems of bibliographic control, 
one wonders if we can assemble a different but equally diverse array of 
resources and skills to address conservation, for it will surely require as 
sustained an effort to preserve the twentieth century's bibliography for the 
twenty-first. 

C.J.S. 

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