The preservation administrator's most important working relationship is with the conservators. This is such a core part of the work that I have to constantly re-correct myself from writing with possessives: my conservators, our conservators. A good conservator is a treasure, well worth coveting. A critical part of my formation as a preservation administrator was the opportunity to work with conservators who really knew their business. I consider myself blessed to have had a chance to work with many of the finest, at Indiana, New York Public, and now at UCLA.

There is a special dynamic in the library preservation model that mirrors what happens in health and medicine. Lewis Thomas observed that the increase in human longevity was more attributable to plumbers than doctors, alluding to the importance of sanitation and public health, rather than medicine, in effecting broad improvements in our quality of life. That said, Lewis Thomas was one of a legion of people who have made important advances and observations about the power of medicine to cure and correct. The one is best with the other. I think this is true of preservation and conservation, as well.

This relationship is also becoming more important.

I think that as preservation administration finds its feet in the 21st century, one of our key roles will be to provide the administrative and public health environment for a growing and more diverse group of conservators. Book and paper conservation are already part and parcel of the library preservation effort, and I would venture to say that all of us could keep a photo conservator busily employed for life and then some.

It is increasingly common for libraries to engage with audio and video media preservation, and I submit that recording engineers are conservators by another name. By way of proof, I suspect that some people read that last sentence and thought, "well, it's really grooved media and magnetic media, as much as audio and video, and of course motion picture films are really photographic transparencies." It's exactly what happens when you say "leather" or "book" around a conservator. Which animal? What sewing structure? Alum-tawed or chrome tanned?

This goes further, too. Most preservation administrators will also be called on to work on digital preservation. But no one has a deep theoretical understanding and practical competency in every one of these areas. When I look at my IT department, I see digital conservators waiting to be formed. In this area, as in every other area of our program, we will need to channel the format and technology specific expertise of specialists into service of the library's preservation mission.

You can see where this comes back to the hospital metaphor. No hospital administrator or public health official can slip on the gloves and stand in for their surgeon, their anesthesiologist, their nursing staff, their GI doctor, oncologist, and so on. But they must know enough to have a productive conversation and be able to martial those forces to save lives and improve health.

I think that modern preservation administrators are being pushed and called to that same role and that gives me a sense of hope and excitement. There's a real set of theory and praxis to be learned and developed here: how to get the best out of expert practitioners; how to determine when a conservation speciality needs to be inside the organization, and when it can be an external provider; how to see trends and track progress; the list, as always, goes on.

This way of thinking obviously bears on what education for preservation administration should consist in. I think it also bears on one of my habits for self-assessment and program development. I'll go out on a limb and say that the projects that have really worked have been the ones where I looked outside my department and pulled in experts: the Anderson school and the Statistics department at UCLA, the Image Permanence Institute, the library schools (over and over again), and happily this list can go on, too.

Summing up? Find the smartest people you can and get them in a room together. Make sure they have plenty of big tables. Ask them to fix some things. That's probably as close to a philosophy of preservation administrations as I'll get today.