Keeping something around is a lot of work and often times a lot of luck as well. Why do we do it and how can we do it better?
You may be familiar with “reduce, reuse, recycle” in relation to waste management, but it is also relevant to the responsibilities of a library. As librarians and archivists, we are stewards of human knowledge. Our goal is to reduce the loss of information, reuse it by providing access to patrons, and ultimately recycle it as our communities build off what came before to create new information. Every step in that process is important but for this blog post, we’re interested specifically in the first step, reducing the loss of information. In libraries and archives, we call this preservation.