The Brittle Books Program is an initiative carried out by the National Endowment for the Humanities at the request of the United States Congress.
As mass deacidification efforts proved costly and inconsistent, librarians and archivists began looking for more practical ways to preserve the intellectual content of the decaying material.
[8] With his own observations of his collection and tests conducted, he announced to the library community that acid deterioration begins to show signs after 20,40 and 80 years.
Unlike other National Endowment for the Humanities preservation funding initiatives, the Brittle Books program does require that an institution in each state must be awarded a grant.
To be awarded a grant as part of the Brittle Books Program, institutions were required to abide by five basic conditions: While there is a deacidification method that can successfully lower the acidity in brittle books, many public libraries do not have the funding to implement standard programs to halt the deterioration taking place in these institutions.
Even microfiche is easier to store than microfilm, provided organizational practices prevent the divestment of sheets from their filing system.
As proper archival-quality digitization requires use of large, uncompressed TIFF files, storage can be a significant cost, especially for public libraries.
A list-serv[18] is utilized for the posting of titles so a consortium of libraries can benefit from a reduced cost in replication so they may maintain their circulating collections.