THE BIG PICTURE:PRESERVATION STRATEGIESIN CONTEXT

The framework for a national preservation program has been in place for a long time, and there has been systematic progress toward achieving national preservation goals. This paper gives a history and analysis of the National Endowment for the Humanities support for preservation beginning in 1979, demonstrating that its grant-funded projects have greatly strengthened the capacity of institutions to care for their collections and have systematically preserved the content of significant humanities collections. To advance our capacity to ensure continuing access to digital collections-textual and non-textual-we will need to sustain a collaboration among multiple agencies and knowledge domains.