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Preservation activities have existed in libraries since the early days of librarianship, but these efforts were mostly decentralized and buried in the work of many different departments. Not until the 1970s did library organizations begin to add preservation to organizational charts on a departmental or middle management level, along with its new administrative costs. At that time, libraries were struggling with early efforts at automation and the many changes it would bring to their organizations. Preservation department functions, formerly decentralized from an administrative and budgetary standpoint under the headings of commercial binding, book repair, special collections, or circulation, were now identified as a budget line forced to compete for funds with newly formed library systems departments as well as other traditional library functions. This was particularly difficult given that a large portion of the costs of a comprehensive preservation department were new and additive (Fasana and Baker, 1992, p. 132), yet provided few immediately evident benefits. A burgeoning library systems unit could place libraries on the cutting edge of technology; automated card catalogs could improve productivity and efficiency for staff, and also provide for better patron access to collections. Needless to say, systems departments were much better funded than preservation units at this time.

RLG is a not-for-profit international alliance of about 160 members, including universities and colleges, national and public research libraries, archives, historical societies, museums, and independent research collections devoted to improving access to information that supports research and learning. Founded in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group by four visionary library directors from Columbia, Harvard and Yale universities and the New York Public Library, the consortium formed to allow research institutions to tackle tough challenges via collaborative action. Key issues were managing the transition from locally self-sufficient and independently comprehensive collections to a system of interdependencies that would preserve and enhance the capacity for research in all fields of knowledge and improving the ability to locate and retrieve relevant research resources (RLG, 1986). At its inception, four activity areas were identified for collaborative action: cooperative bibliographic control and access; effective mechanisms for sharing information and resources among member institutions; expanded and coordinated collection development efforts; and preservation of the collections, either in the original or surrogate format.

In this chapter, the authors define the new business term, future-proofing, and apply it to knowledge preservation and curation. The fundamental principles of future-proofing and the challenges and mechanics are discussed. These challenges are discussed in developing future-proofed knowledge preservation, and a curation strategy is identified. The authors identify four challenges to future-proofing a knowledge preservation and curation strategy – availability, visibility, accessibility, and consumability of knowledge assets. Ultimately, the greatest challenge to future-proofing these strategies lies in the channels we use to create, transmit, share, and store knowledge assets. At a minimum, the chapter speaks to the critical importance of future-proofing the preservation of knowledge assets, so there is a possibility of curation at some point in a known or unknown future.

This chapter makes a case for extending institutional preservation strategies to the entire landscape of knowledge capital. First, the authors define the three primary types of capital – physical, financial, and knowledge. Knowledge capital is further broken down into three categories – human, structural, and relational. The individual types of knowledge capital are defined, along with their variant economic properties and behaviors. The challenges these variations present for preservation are discussed. The authors also highlight these assets’ significant opportunities for curating new knowledge. Each type of knowledge capital is described, along with the preservation challenges and the curation opportunities.

Moving images represent a category of material which has historically received short shrift in most libraries and archives. Film, video, and now digital images form a significant part of many library and archival collections, however, and can be found in many formats and genres. Despite the ubiquity of such media in cultural institutions, the majority of libraries and archives owning collections of moving images have neglected these holdings—with the specific exception of those few archives devoted primarily to the care and preservation of moving images.