Preservation Week -- Pass it on...

American Library Association is sponsoring a national Preservation Week from April 23rd to the 29th, 2017. Here is the explanation about the challenge:

In 2005 the first comprehensive national survey of the condition and preservation needs of the nation’s collections reported that U.S. institutions hold more than 4.8 billion items. Libraries alone hold 3 billion items (63 percent of the whole). A treasure trove of uncounted additional items is held by individuals, families, and communities. These collections include books, manuscripts, photographs, prints and drawings, and objects such as maps, textiles, paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and furniture, to give just a sample. They include moving images and sound recordings that capture performing arts, oral history, and other records of our creativity and history. Digital collections are growing fast, and their formats quickly become obsolescent, if not obsolete.

The importance of our awareness is explained as follows;

Some 630 million items in collecting institutions require immediate attention and care. Eighty percent of these institutions have no paid staff assigned responsibility for collections care; 22 percent have no collections care personnel at all. Some 2.6 billion items are not protected by an emergency plan. As natural disasters of recent years have taught us, these resources are in jeopardy should a disaster strike. Personal, family, and community collections are equally at risk. 

ALA encourages libraries and other institutions to use Preservation Week to connect our communities through events, activities, and resources that highlight what we can do, individually and together, to preserve our personal and shared collections.

From my own perspective, the American Library Association is vastly underestimating the number of records and the challenge. This is a substantial example of the need for genealogists worldwide to become proactive in the area of document preservation. Individually, we can take this as a good opportunity to look around in our own neighborhoods, cities, counties and states or provinces to see what can be done to support the preservation of records that are already in libraries and archives.