Regrettably, libraries have never had sufficient funds to collect and preserve everything of potential research value. Given the nature of contemporary scholarship and its wide-ranging interest in material and popular culture, this trend makes perfect sense. Yet he, too, failed to address the crucial matters of who would bear the responsibility for setting priorities, who would assume the custodial burden of these comprehensive collections, and who would fund these activities (Baker 2001).Īn increasing number of library collections are being promoted, as it were, to resources of artifactual, not just informational, value. He further asserted that it is the responsibility of libraries in general and of certain large libraries in particular to collect masses of primary source materials and preserve them in their artifactual form. Nicholson Baker recently alleged that libraries’ poor stewardship of books and serials has resulted in the loss of many resources of artifactual value. This is because, while asserting the importance of preserving as many artifacts as possible and acknowledging the need to set priorities for preservation, the statement gave no guidance about how to make such priorities. 4 Although careful to note it is not possible to save all copies of printed materials from destruction and the ravages of time, the committee’s statement nonetheless provoked some anxiety among librarians. Members asserted that for practical purposes, all historical publications, even those produced by mass-production techniques designed to minimize deviations from a norm, have unique physical qualities that may have value as a carrier of (physical) evidence in a given research project. This group defined an artifact or primary record as “a physical object produced or used at the particular past time that one is concerned with in a given instance” (MLA 1996). To call attention to the dangers inherent in ignoring the fate of physical collections, the association created a committee to consider the issue. The Modern Language Association (MLA) has been concerned that the technologies of reproduction, such as photocopying, microfilming, and digital scanning, are becoming so good, so readily available, and so serviceable for many research and teaching purposes, that the importance of the underlying original might be devalued. In recent years, scholars have identified an increasing number of library items that have research value as physical objects, above and beyond the information recorded in them. In other words, artifacts are things that have intrinsic value as objects, independent of their informational content. 3 For the purposes of this report, an artifact will be defined as an information resource in which the information is recorded on a physical medium, such as a photograph or a book, and in which the information value of the resource adheres not only in the text or content but also in the object itself. In academic parlance, “artifact” can refer to a physical object, a primary record, or a physical object that constitutes a primary record. The word “artifact” can be confusing because it masks a number of unexamined assumptions.
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