dec10b.indd


C&RL News December 2010  650

Jane Hedberg is senior preservation program officer 
at Harvard University Library, e-mail: jane_hedberg@
harvard.edu; fax: (617) 496-8344

Recorded sound preservation
The National Recording Preservation Board 
of the Library of Congress commissioned the 
Council on Library and Information Resources 
(CLIR) to publish “The State of Recorded 
Sound Preservation in the United States: A 
National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age.” 

The 169-page study describes the current 
situation of, and challenges to, the preserva-
tion of our audio heritage. It has four chapters, 
1) Sound Recording Collections: An Overview 
of Preservation and Public Access in the 
Twenty-First Century, 2) Technical Issues in 
Digital Audio Preservation, 3) Development 
of Curricula in Recorded Sound Preservation 
and Archives Management, and 4) Preserva-
tion, Access and Copyright: A Tangled Web. 

The study is a precursor to the National 
Recording Preservation Plan that is due for 
publication shortly. The plan was mandated 
by Congress in the National Recording Pres-
ervation Act of 2000.

The study is available as a free PDF (1 MB) 
or as a print publication for $30. To obtain 
a copy, go to www.clir.org/pubs/abstract 
/pub148abst.html. It is CLIR publication 148.

Papermaking history
Cathleen A. Baker’s long-awaited book, From 
the Hand to the Machine. Nineteenth-Century 
American Paper and Mediums: Technolo-
gies, Materials, and Conservation, has been 
published. 

The 432-page book traces the history of 
the U.S. paper industry from 1690 to 1900, 
covering technical and production innova-
tions especially during the 19th century. It 
also considers the technologies of printing, 
printmaking and drawing, and their relation-
ships to the paper on which they were ren-

dered. Lastly, it describes the characteristics 
of the paper, the deterioration it may suffer, 
possible treatments of the deterioration, and 
how to make the best conservation decisions.
The book is available for $65 from Legacy 
Press, www.thelegacypress.com. ISBN: 978-
0-9797974-2-2.

Connecting to collections report
The Institute of Museum and Library Services 
(IMLS) released “Connecting to Collections: A 
Report to the Nation” in October 2010. The 
48-page report describes the progress made 
in preservation outreach to the U.S. cultural 
heritage community since 2007 when IMLS 
launched Connecting to Collections: A Call 
to Action. 

During the past three years, IMLS has 
supported five regional conferences, one 
international summit, 3,000 sets of essential 
texts about collections care distributed to 
U.S. institutions, and 107 awards through 
the American Heritage Preservation Grants 
program.

The report is available as a free PDF at 
www.imls.gov/pdf/CtoCReport.pdf. For more 
information about the Call to Action, go to 
www.imls.gov/collections/.

NDSA
The Library of Congress formed the Na-
tional Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) 
in July 2010. It is a coalition of government 
agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit 
organizations, and businesses to, as the Web 
site states, “preserve a distributed national 
digital collection for the benefit of citizens 
now and in the future.” NDSA is an out-
growth of the National Digital Information 
Infrastructure and Preservation Program of 
which the founding members of NDSA are 
also members.

For more information, go to www.digital-
preservation.gov/ndsa/. 

P r e s e r v a t i o n  N e w sJane Hedberg