Assignment #1: Context & Collaboration

"Preservation professionals across various disciplines should meet with thoughtful thinkers from the fields of art, humanities, engineering, architecture, science, computer science, and industry on a regular basis to address issues particular to individual formats and inherent to all formats."
-- Michèle Valerie Cloonan, "W(h)ither Preservation?"
(The Library Quarterly, April 2001, page 239)

Collaboration is a buzz word in the conservation field these days, as evidenced by the 2008 AIC annual conference theme "Creative Collaboration," and it is critical to the reality of modern libraries. It's also not exactly a new idea. For this week's post, I decided to delve into the archives, so to speak, and look at an article on preservation philosophy published over 30 years ago. Paul Philippot's "Historic Preservation: Philosophy, Criteria, Guidelines, I, " originally published in 1976 and reprinted in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of the Cultural Heritage (The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996), offers a useful foundation for thinking about Cloonan's more practical approach to 21st century preservation concerns.

Philippot, former Director-General of ICCROM, does not address library preservation specifically, but his philosophy of art and architecture preservation is a clear precursor to Cloonan. Philippot connects the emergence of modern historical consciousness to the end of the 18th century, when the rise of the Industrial Revolution severed the traditional link Westerners had with their past. Preservation, he argues, arises to patch this disconnect: "the word preservation . . . can be considered, from this point of view, as expressing the modern way of maintaining living contact with cultural works of the past." The greatest challenge faced by preservationists, then, is to safeguard the "genuine voice of the past."

To accomplish this, Philippot offers general criteria for choosing what objects to preserve and a three-part preservation methodology that takes into account the object as a whole, including its context and its history. The key is working collaboratively. He argues that it "is obvious that what is a whole must be treated consistently as a whole, and this implies that close cooperation among various specialists in preservation--architects, conservators, artisans--under one consistent policy is necessary." In order to understand the cultural heritage we are preserving, we have to understand the historical context in which it was created, used, and valued, as well as how that context has and will continue to change. The only way to successfully contextualize our objects/collections is to facilitate dialogue among a wide range of individuals and institutions. This contextualization allows us to establish treatment priorities and construct a framework for our policies and planning.

It is frustrating to read in Cloonan that there is still a need, in both the library and conservation fields, for an overarching conceptual framework that would allow for integrating the various disciplines and resources necessary to contextualize cultural heritage. Especially since it's clear that Philippot was aware of this need, at least to an extent, over 30 years ago.

Michèle Valerie Cloonan, W(H)ITHER Preservation? The Library Quarterly, Vol. 71, No.
2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 231-242 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4309507

Philippot, Paul. "Historic Preservation: Philosophy, Criteria, Guidelines, I." Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996. pp. 268-274.