Drawing on historical texts, this accessible volume provides a broad understanding of preservation for librarians, archivists, and museum specialists. Cloonan offers students and professionals an overview of longevity, reversibility, enduring value, and authenticity of information preservation. Each section includes historical works that form the basis of contemporary thinking and practices, readings from a variety of fields that are primarily concerned with the preservation of cultural heritage, and hard-to-find publications that shed new light on how to approach contemporary problems. The author's selections and insightful commentary on each comprise a truly global and current view of preservation.