Choosing to Preserve: : Towards a Cooperative Strategy for Long‐Term Access to the Intellectual Heritage. Papers of the International Conference Organized by the European Commission on preservation and Access and Die Deutsche Bibliothek, Leipzig/Frankfurt am Main, March 29‐30, 1996

The eighteen papers in this conference proceedings, four of which are in German, together present a picture of the state of library and archives preservation, and of preservation activities, in European countries. This material is often hard to find in English. Papers in this volume describe a wide range of approaches, ranging from simple to sophisticated. Preservation activities in Portugal, Nordic and Baltic countries, Russia, Poland, France, Britain, Holland and Germany are described. The picture they give presents few surprises: we learn, for instance, that one quarter of the books in German research libraries (about sixty million volumes) have been withdrawn from use because they are too fragile.

Pieter J. Drenth, Chairman of the European Commission on Preservation and Access, notes in his paper that the conference’s title (“Choosing to Preserve”) has two aspects: making the commitment to preserving the documented past; and selecting what to preserve, setting priorities, coordinating activities, and so on. These are the themes of the papers presented at this conference, two of which describe the cooperative preservation activities of the Research Libraries Group, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Library of Congress in the US. I found the most useful, practical and thought‐provoking paper to be that by Trudy Huskamp Peterson, a senior American archivist recently transplanted to Hungary, who examines five areas for cooperation in preservation activities.

Is this book of interest to information professionals in the Asia‐Pacific region? The answer is a definite yes for those who are interested in looking beyond the shores of their countries to see what is happening elsewhere, in order to learn about different approaches to problems which we all share.