Learning to Blush: Librarians and the Embarassment of Experience

This paper applies Edward Tennerʹs theory concerning the unintended consequences of technological innovation to issues affecting library collections. In reviewing recent, highly publicized critiques of preservation strategy-particularly those of Nicholson Baker-the paper tries to bring some clarity to the complex choices librarians face regarding artifactual and content-based preservation. It also raises the question of how the culture of a technologically oriented but grossly underfinanced professional community may have affected some of our past efforts to manage change responsibly, as well as our stance when we do not get things quite right; and it offers suggestions on how we might do better going forward. If our great research libraries are to act responsibly with regard to preservation, they will have to assume a much more cautious stance toward the wholesale adoption of technology than they have shown in recent decades. To our collective embarassment-we may, like many other professional cultures, have to learn to blush-print may well turn out to be the most stable of the technologies available.