Lawrence L. Reger is president of Heritage Preservation, a nonprofit
organization based in Washington, D.C. The members of Heritage
Preservation,
founded in 1973, have included libraries, museums,
archives, historical
societies and others concerned with saving the
past for the future. Reger’s
commitment to preservation began nearly 40
years ago, when he left his hometown
of Lincoln, Neb., for Washington
to work in arts advocacy.
When I really want to get someone’s attention about preservation, I tell the
story of the distinguished scholar who turned a book into dust. The setting was
the U.S. Capitol in the 1980s, and O.B. Hardison, director of the Folger
Shakespeare Library, was telling a congressional committee about the precarious
condition of irreplaceable books in the nation’s libraries. He wanted them to
see, he said, just how fragile a book can be. With a gentle motion, he lifted a
yellowed, brittle page, and it crumbled into tiny fragments, right there in the
hearing room.
 The urgency of preserving objects in the nation’s collections
first attracted my attention 36 years ago. I had moved to Washington to work for
the National Endowment for the Arts, then a relatively new agency led by the
indomitable Nancy Hanks. One of the many things Nancy felt passionately about
was helping museums care for works of art. And they needed serious help.
Inadequate facilities, environmental controls and storage space, along with a
shortage of trained staff—the problems added up to a preservation emergency. In
1972, the NEA started giving museums grants for art conservation.
When I
became director of the American Association of Museums in 1978, we kept working
on collections preservation—educating museums, studying needs and pressing for
more financial support from the public and private sectors. In those days, we
didn’t have reliable data. We learned from anecdotes and observations that
collections care was a critical issue, and we did our best to raise both
awareness and money.
Now we do have solid information, and the news is
alarming. Last year, Heritage Preservation released the results of the first
comprehensive survey ever conducted of the condition and preservation needs of
the nation’s collections. According to A Public Trust at Risk: The Heritage
Health Index Report on the State of America’s Collections, 80 percent of
collecting institutions have no emergency plan to protect collections and no
staff trained to deal with emergencies. We found that improper storage has
caused damage to collections in 65 percent of these institutions. An astounding
190 million objects are in urgent need of conservation treatment. The most
pressing preservation need in collecting institutions is better environmental
controls. Objects are actually at risk because of the very structures and
systems that are supposed to protect them.
Models of Memory
It is worth reflecting for a moment on why we have these
collections in the first place and what they mean to each one of us. More than
4.8 billion artifacts are held in public trust by more than 30,000 archives,
historical societies, libraries, museums, scientific research collections and
archaeological repositories in the United States. They “belong” to you and me,
but collecting institutions protect them so that they are available to us and to
future generations.
Unlike some other capital assets, collections appreciate
in value over time—not just monetary value, but historical, civic, educational
and emotional value. I’ve always liked the way the late A. Bartlett Giamatti,
president of Yale University, described museums, libraries and archives. He
called them a “model of the memory, a repository of images, a chamber of living
dreams, a glass for focusing the visions of the future.” Far from being static
storehouses, they are “expressions of conviction that the future is not simply
possible, but accessible; and not simply accessible, but potentially
noble.”
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