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Published as part of the University of Massachusetts Press series on Studies in Print Culture and History of the Book, Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market is a well-written and fascinating history of how various stakeholders—and their differing motivations—shaped the literary archives trade in the United States of America. Amy Hildreth Chen, who holds a PhD in English from Emory University, previously was an academic librarian at the University of Iowa and now is an independent scholar. She traces the largely overlooked history of the trade in literary papers from its post-World War II origins through to the mid-2010s. The book comprises an introduction, conclusion, and six chapters. After a brief first chapter on the various values implicated in archives (financial, scholarly, and public), Placing Papers examines the literary archives market from the perspective of several key stakeholder groups: authors and their families (chapter 2), agents and dealers (chapter 3), directors and curators (chapter 4), archivists and digital archivists (chapter 5), and, finally, scholars and members of the public (chapter 6).

How might a book review—or a book itself for that matter—change in scope or meaning if its readers are under quarantine? For those of us living in an altered state due to the COVID-19 public health crisis, nothing is as it was. So why should reading and reviewing a book like Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark A. Greene be any different? When libraries, archives, historical societies, and college classrooms closed to the public to slow the spread of a deadly disease, many archivists and librarians went into exile. Our reading rooms and our researchers, our collections and our facilities, were off limits. For some of us, our very livelihoods are at risk (or worse, were laid waste) by these closures. What would Mark Greene have said? What would he have done? And for those who don’t yet know who Mark Greene was, why do his archival values matter? And why now?

Shaun Slifer had never heard of the Appalachian Movement Press (AMP) when he was handed one of its publications while attending a wedding at the Appalachian South Folklife Center (ASFC) in Pipestem, West Virginia, in 2016. Neither had almost anyone else, as its history had gone largely undocumented. Slifer, the creative director of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, West Virginia, was already aware of the rich and complex ways that cultural production, social movements, and historical collections can interact. He put that knowledge to use in recovering the history of a press that played a key role during a crucial decade of organizing for justice in Appalachia. So Much to Be Angry About: Appalachian Movement Press and Radical DIY Publishing, 1969–1979 is the informative result.

What difference does it make if we are imprecise about how we use words? What difference does it make if we are unwilling or unable to distinguish among “records,” “information,” and “data”? Plenty, according to Geoffrey Yeo, in this, his latest attempt to think clearly and authoritatively about archival records “in an information culture.”

Historical Perspectives in the Conservation of Works of Art on Paper provides a comprehensive collection of ninety-six readings—spanning six centuries—related to the conservation of paper-based art. Published by the Getty Conservation Institute, one of this work’s greatest strengths is its masterful organization of texts, which builds and climaxes in a finale that offers a multifaceted yet distinct and straightforward representation of the field of conservation.The readings are gathered into eight sections based on the development of the technology behind and the thinking that underpins the field. “The Powers of Paper” illustrates various ideas about the role of paper. Practical, . . .

This paper will explore how information played an important role in the history of the Hanford site. Looking closely at Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Energy (DOE), and other government agency publications and documents will bring more insight into the effects on the environment and how the government has handled the situation throughout its operations. This paper will also add non-governmental perspectives on the issues presenting news reports and evidence that call attention to the problems.

Collecting and preserving e-books in special collections institutions poses challenges and rewards for working professionals in the field. Although scholars of book history have spent the last decade or so including e-books in their historical overviews, reviewing e-books’ connections to their physical past and speculating on their impact on the future of books, their importance in the overall timeline of book evolution has not yet made an impact on collecting guidelines. Institutions do not seem overly eager to be the first to create a permanent collection of e-books—and there may be just cause for reluctance. Not only do e-book files come with the same long-term preservation problems as any born-digital materials, they also have added complications such as a lack of standardized file format, a lack of permanence in licensing agreements, and the constant threat of content changes, just to name a few. While this paper aims to persuade special collections libraries to begin collecting e-books, it also lays out the complications standing in the way of a successful e-book collection. It starts a conversation around possible solutions for long-term preservation and patron-use challenges for e-books in special collections.

“I thought you didn’t want to see another map again,” my partner joked as I held up the book I was sent to review. Indeed, that’s a sentiment I uttered more than a few times three years ago, when I graduated from library school and went on the job market after 10 years of working in a university map collection and on several historical mapping projects. It was in these roles that I learned the nuances of digitization, visualization, and time-series data structures using geographic information systems (GIS) software. Over my time in the library, I became disillusioned with a number of trends not isolated to my workplace, including the fetishization of rare materials, the elision of labor, the detached overtheorization of “the archive,” and the extensive intellectual gatekeeping meant to exclude those seen as lacking the appropriate credentials and occupational categories to produce scholarship. Indeed, I thought I’d be the right person to take on Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to our Digital Era , given my expertise in the production, distribution, and access of (historical) maps. However, the book’s explorations break little new ground outside the domain of histories of cartography. The digital era promised in the book’s subtitle is not a point of arrival, as suggested, but an insistence that even more study into a format and genre that has seen considerable scholarly attention for centuries is needed, with minimal ethical engagement with the conditions of the production and reproduction of paper maps.

This paper asks if there is an optimal wait period for e-books that balances libraries’ desire to acquire books soon after their publication with the frequent desire to purchase books electronically whenever feasible. Analyzing 13,043 titles that Temple University Libraries received on its e-preferred approval plan in 2014–15, the author looks at the delays from the publication of print books to publication of their electronic versions. The analysis finds that most books on the approval plan are published electronically within a week of the print. Recommended wait periods are provided for different subjects.

In 2007, a web-based survey of book conservation practices was conducted to document standard-practice, moderate-use, and low-use book conservation treatments for general and special collections in research libraries in the United States. This paper reports on the findings of a ten-year follow-up survey conducted in 2017 to determine whether and how book conservation treatment practices have changed over the last ten years. Overall, the data indicate that while general collections treatment practices have remained consistent, special collections practices continue to evolve, with many treatments newly qualifying as standard practice in the special collections context since 2007. The data also suggest areas of further research, including how demographic factors may correlate with particular treatment practices.