Building preservation: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's stacks assessment

Abstract

This article discusses the results of two collection assessments conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The library's Preservation Committee completed the first assessment and reported its results in College & Research Libraries in 1989. The second assessment was completed in 2002 and accompanies the institution's initiative to establish the library's first centralized preservation and conservation program. Both assessments focused on the central stacks collection, a repository collection serving the institution's forty-two branch and departmental libraries. Although a reanalysis of the first assessment's data was impossible, the authors attempted to draw comparisons between the two assessments' results. After thirteen years without a preservation program and without any significant facilities improvements, the results provide insight into the results of deferred collections care and facilities maintenance and offer guidance for conducting similar studies with other research library collections.