Thank you very much, Alice. I feel honored to have been asked to address you tonight and pleased to be among a number of old friends. But I'm still puzzled by that old question, "Why Me?", a retired librarian, out of touch with much of your digital world, forgetting much of what I thought I knew, unfamiliar with a whole new vocabulary, and preoccupied with other things. I'm reminded of a time a few years ago when my wife and I were at the Jackson Hole airport waiting for a plane. She was reading the local newspaper and found an ad seeking musicians for the community orchestra and came across this astonishing statement: "ability to read music desirable." Well, you should be warned that I had no audition for this performance; I did recently read a paper Alice wrote for a Rare Books and Manuscripts Section conference on the importance of the original artifact in our emerging digital world. There was my clue-she wanted an original relic, and for that I felt completely qualified.

      Just to prove my point: 30 years ago I was giving a talk at the Library of Congress on much the same topic as this meeting, selectivity in preservation. To emphasize the extent of the preservation problem I happened to mention that Penguin Books and I had been born in the same year and that I had survived many of them. Just then my old mentor and former boss, Bill Towner from the Newberry Library, piped up from the second row that he had plenty of Penguins in better shape than me.

      Although more engaged with polar studies than library management in retirement, I have done some homework for tonight's talk and have been very impressed by what has been done in global resources management for libraries, both in attacking and publicizing the general problem, and in developing action programs for specific fields. As far as I can tell, most of this activity has occurred in the last ten years, a short time for what has been achieved, and so kudos to AAU, ARL, CRL, to the Mellon Foundation, and to the many participating institutions who have kept these issues alive and begun to address them.

      I think we have to admit at the outset that the historical record we are trying to preserve is a pretty frail beast. I've taken my title from a fictional character who gets everything wrong, Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan's The Rivals. I saw the play a few months ago and these lines jumped off the stage: "we will not anticipate the past;…-our retrospection will now be all to the future." I think Mrs. Malaprop meant to advise the young lovers to get on with it. In the lobby before the play, I overheard a cell phone conversation, a fellow playgoer describing the play we were about to see as a drama set in the 19th century in which "one of the characters gets all her words wrong. I think she's called Mrs. Malcontent." Mrs. Malcontent isn't the only one who gets things wrong; so does the historical record that we try so hard to preserve: records lie, publicists embellish, self-promoters declaim, scholars steal, photographs misrepresent, words fall off the page, digits off the disc, and through it all memory does not serve. The current fracas in the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere over the accuracy of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography illustrates the uncertainties over both fact and interpretation. There is an old story about the British conductor Thomas Beecham at a London party following World War II. He met a familiar looking lady whom he simply could not identify, so he tried to chat her up for some clue. Desperate, he tried his last gambit: "and your husband, how is he, what has he been doing lately?" "Oh, he's still king." I can't resist one other example of ubiquitous distortion, a translation of the 23rd Psalm which somehow went from Danish to Inuktituk and finally into English where it came out thus: "The Lord is my great keeper; he does not like me; he hits me over the head; he pushes me into the water."

      The more I delve into the history of the Polar Regions the more the metaphor of history as an iceberg becomes persuasive: one tenth in view, all of it changing, most of it disappearing. The bottom might be grounded and the whole thing might not move for a couple of decades (like some historical fashions), but eventually it will move on. Tearing the icy edifice apart are the passionate partisans of disputed interpretations. To give some polar examples: Innuit versus intruders; global warming versus environmental exploitation; Cook versus Peary; Scott versus Amundsen; Scott versus Shackleton; land claims; the naming of places; civilizing the savage versus assimilating native knowledge; the question of failure and fame and character: "why do the wicked prosper" while the honest scientist goes unheralded, and many other unresolved debates. It was no accident that to one of the most famous of polar explorers was attributed the motto: "If you don't make it, fake it." I doubt that such a litany of dispute over the record, by both cautious scholars and activist partisans, is much different from any other body of study, but I hope it gives some idea of the pessimistic direction I'm taking for point Number 1: Counsels of Perfection will not lead you through this morass. Counsels of Pragmatism will be the necessary alternative. Every academic call for comprehensive retention and access needs a corresponding caveat of realism.

      Allied to point No. 1 is my second point: salvation will not come without recognition of loss. The history of libraries includes more libraries that have disappeared than have survived. The overwhelming impression of my four years devoted to library histories, despite the ubiquitous space problems, is one of decay and destruction, both in whole institutions (from Alexandria to Sarajevo) and in essential segments of libraries that survive (from Louvain to the Library of Congress). The causes are many: war, fire, flood, earthquake, ideology, censorship, stupidity, neglect, theft (though much of that survives), physical disintegration, and electronic deterioration. Examples are legion and disheartening. Offsetting legends of astonishing survivals are less frequent but more encouraging: the Cairo Gennizah manuscripts after a few millennia, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the expedition relics of Vitus Barentz's 1597 Northeast Passage expedition discovered 300 years later, Bizet's Symphony in C mouldering for 50 years before becoming a Balanchine classic. These are encouraging exceptions to a sometimes bleak picture.

      Once again I have been struck by how little the issues have changed from decade to decade, at least in American librarianship. The selection debate we face with digitization was the microfilm preservation debate of the 1970s, i.e. what to film or digitize and why not something else. And will what we film or digitize survive? The serials problem was not new in the 1930s when ARL was founded, partly as a result of a serials crisis. The desire for and disdain of collaboration continue. One recent statement, "We are no longer in an era when even a well-endowed institution can proceed alone," could easily have been plagiarized from stump speeches of the 1970s if not before. But back then we pretty much ignored the point and went on with our redundant, overlapping, and competitive activities. At least the language is changing, or old words gaining new meanings: "institutional repository," "data curation," "harvesting," "resource discovery" were not the common lingo ten years ago, not to mention the continuing plague of misleading acronyms, which was common then. Even "trust" has some new connotations I don't quite fathom. This linguistic trend is probably not worth fighting but at least we can try to be responsible communicators to the outside world. The snobbism of any private language can be as destructive as the snobbism of the symphony orchestra is to its own survival.

      This conference is appropriately addressed to the work at "top universities" in preserving the global record. That's where the concentration of resources is. But it brings me to point 3: I would plead with you not to neglect the archipelagos of archival islands, the worldwide distribution in smaller institutions (historical societies, museums, small colleges, second tier colleges, etc) where parts of the human record also exist. I'm thinking of such places as local record societies throughout the world with their limited resources and even more limited hours of access, of a place like the Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences which happens to have the Barentz journals that I mentioned earlier, of historically black colleges in the south with fascinating materials often poorly housed. (I'm sure Jonathan Spence could give us a number of examples.) Even in your top universities the archival collections are in fact already archipelagos of isolated collections, with tenuous connections to other islands, and it is the obvious job of the librarian-archivist to provide the navigational tools for getting through the shoals. Scholarship itself may not be as widely distributed as those collections, but there is plenty going on outside the top universities. We need to find ways within any systems we pursue to include them, both collections and outside scholars, in our community as partners, even equals. Here is where electronic applications can be both savior and the great leveler, recognizing the disparity of riches and the congruence of interest.

      Obviously, to widen the net is to reinforce the oldest conundrum of all: too many needs, too few resources. That question in turn leads to the most difficult question of all, what is most essential for retention, where should are primary energies and funds be directed? How do we choose? In a global context, how do we rise above Western perceptions of what is most important? Where do we start? One logical response is to ask what materials will be needed or wanted in the future, though that presupposes that we know already what questions will be asked of the archive. But in a very real sense scholarship often works the other way around, that is that what survives suggests the questions. Five years ago I accidentally ran across the catalogue of an expeditionary ship's library-that discovery led to other accidents of discovery and what is now a large and growing body of material on shipboard reading in cold climates. It's not enough to say that what is essential for retention is the unrecognized "treasures" that will answer as yet unasked questions. Obviously I think that those booklists I've located in London, Greenwich, Winnipeg, Hanover, Leipzig, and in private hands are essential candidates for preservation, but as of now only for me. How can we possibly respond to such solipsistic demands?

      My own administrative experience suggests a few obvious approaches: pick the low-hanging fruit; don't be paralyzed by decision making into losing time; save what you can and let posterity ask the questions; let the commercial incentives help in the task but don't let them determine all of the outcome. Scholars are like explorers: they get their kicks from going where no one has been before

      One other point before concluding. Part of the purpose of this conference is to build better bridges between the scholarly community and librarians who serve that community. Over the years there has been more crossover than you would guess, principally of scholars, artists, and writers who have served as librarians. Among them were philosophers Leibnitz, Lessing, Hume, and Berkeley; writers Casanova, Strindberg, Borges, Angus Wilson, MacLeish, and Larkin; artists Marcel Duchamp and Heitor Berlioz; and University Presidents Ezra Stiles and Daniel Coit Gilman. Only the university presidents went from solid careers in librarianship to their university presidencies of Yale and Johns Hopkins respectively. I like to think of them as librarians manqué. The point to you scholars is to cultivate a librarian-find the right one and she will be your greatest aid in resource discovery.

      Some of these issues could easily lead to intellectual paralysis, but what I've tried to do this evening is simply suggest some ideas and issues to keep in the back of your minds during tomorrow's panels and as you pursue your own roles in protecting and preserving the human record. To recapitulate they are to be pragmatic rather than perfectionist; to recognize that large segments of the record will be lost; to admit that subjective guesses are better than none; to cast a wide net for the most fruitful selection possibilities; to cultivate the scholar-librarian connection; and to retain your optimism. As someone said recently, optimists have no unpleasant surprises, pessimists are just unpleasant.

      There can be no ironclad prescriptions of what to do, but nor is there reason for undue pessimism. As one of Tom Stoppard's characters says in Arcadia: "It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong." Or as Mrs. Malaprop might say, let's get on with it. And keep the guesses flying. Thank you very much.

      David Stam is currently University Librarian Emeritus, Syracuse University, and Senior Scholar, Syracuse History Department. His previous positions include: Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries, New York Public Library; Director, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University; Associate Librarian, Newberry Library; and Librarian, Marlboro College.

      David Stam received his B.A. at Wheaton College (Ill); his M.L.S. at Rutgers University; and the Ph.D. from Northwestern University (History). He is a Trustee of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and has served on boards of the Association of Research Libraries, the Research Libraries Group, on the Research Division of the American Historical Association, and the Grolier Club. He has lectured and written extensively in the areas of bibliography, book history, library history, and related areas. Recently, he edited the International Dictionary of Library Histories (2001).

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