Att packa in historien - Beslutandeprocesser, etik och praktik applicerade på ompackning av historiska samlingar

Abstract

State libraries and archives with legal deposits have to draw up strategies for their preservation work. Today’s political situation with constant budget reductions when it comes to preserve the written heritage makes it important for institutions to formulate short term and long term plans and see to that they are anchored politically. Preventive as well as practical conservation calls for a strong ethic base as well as measurable results. This paper tells about preservation strategies at state libraries and the way conservators can create ethical foundations for their decisions. As boxing is a very prominent way of creating preventive care for library and archival collections, a practical experiment to uncover what actually happens inside a book box has been undertaken. In this paper, I present and discuss the results and place it in context with preservation strategies and ethic decisions. The final conclusion is that it is important to make thorough plans for preservation work at public institutions, and that conservators must have access to operational ethical tools to firmly establish their decisions before proceeding with any projected treatment whether preventive care or practical conservation.