Budgeting a Records Preservation Program Over Ten Years

Every preservation request I ever saw die in a budget hearing died the same way. The clerk asked for all of it at once. She had a vendor's quote for every deed book in the vault, the board looked at the bottom line as if it were a ransom note, and the item was tabled "for further study." Further study, in town government, is where good ideas go to retire. The programs that actually got done, in my own office and in the offices of colleagues I trust, were dull by comparison. They asked for a predictable slice every year, showed what the slice bought, and came back the following spring with photographs.

What follows is how I would phase a preservation program over ten years for a town or county office with a vault full of bound volumes, loose files, rolled maps and a few cartons nobody has opened since they were carried over from the old town hall. It assumes no dedicated preservation staff, a governing board whose membership turns over every couple of years, and an operating budget that is mostly spent before anyone thinks about the records.

Start with a condition survey, not a quote

A vendor's quote tells you what it would cost to fix everything. A condition survey tells you what is actually wrong, which is a different and far more useful document. You can do a basic survey yourself with a clipboard, a flashlight and a spreadsheet, or you can bring in a conservator for a day or two to walk the shelves with you. Some state archives offer field visits to local offices. It costs nothing to ask.

Survey by series rather than by single volume, unless a volume is special. For each series, record:

• the series title and volume range (Land Records, Vols. 1–212)
• covering dates
• format: bound volume, loose papers, maps and plans, film, oversize
• number of items or shelf feet
• condition, on a simple four-step scale: stable; worn but usable; damaged or at risk; unusable without treatment
• the specific problems you see, such as red rot on leather, detached boards, broken sewing, brittle paper, old tape, lamination, water staining, mold, or ink burning through the page
• how often staff or the public handle it
• whether a security copy exists, and whether anyone has actually looked at that copy lately
• a photograph or two

Two afternoons of this will teach you more about your vault than ten years of walking past it. If your board first needs convincing that a small office needs a program at all, our guide on who needs a preservation program makes that argument in plain terms.

Score each series on four things

Once you have the survey, rank it. I use four factors, each scored from 1 to 3.

I count condition twice, because damage compounds: every time a fragile book opens, it gets a little worse. So the score is condition times two, plus use, legal value and uniqueness, for a total between 5 and 15. Series scoring 12 or more go into the first tranches. Nine through 11 fill the middle years. Anything under nine gets housekeeping (boxes, folders, a sturdier shelf) and waits its turn.

Two warnings. First, "a copy exists" only counts if you have checked it. Film made decades ago can be scratched, incomplete or missing the very volumes you care about, and a reel nobody can read is not a copy. Our guide to imaging and microfilm as a preservation copy explains what a sound security copy looks like. Second, the scores are not science. They are a way to make the argument once, in public, instead of every year in a hallway. If a board member wants the cemetery records moved up because her grandparents are in them, you can show her exactly where they sit and why, which beats an argument about feelings.

Cut the work into annual tranches

A tranche is a package of work sized to what you can reliably get each year. The temptation is to spend year one entirely on the worst book in the building. Resist it. A good tranche mixes four things:

1. Treatment of a few top-scored volumes or map sets by a qualified conservator.
2. Imaging of those same items once they are stable, so the originals can go back on the shelf and stay there.
3. Housing: boxes, folders, map folders, shelf repairs. Cheap, visible, and it protects everything at once.
4. The room: monitoring, dehumidification, better shelving, lighting, a leak alarm. Improving the environment lifts every item in the vault, including the ones whose turn won't come for eight years.

Mixing the work has practical advantages. Conservators and imaging vendors can batch jobs efficiently, the board sees something tangible every year, and you are never left with a beautifully rebound volume that staff keep wrenching open at the counter because nobody scanned it.

Where the money comes from

Recording-fee surcharges

Some states let recording offices add a small surcharge to recording fees, or set one aside by statute, for records preservation, records management or related technology. The details vary widely: who may collect it, how much, which fund it lands in and what it may be spent on. If your state has one, read the statute itself, then ask your state archives or your clerks' association how other offices use theirs.

A few habits keep such a fund healthy. Hold it in a dedicated account rather than folding it into the general fund. Spend it only on what the statute allows, and keep the paperwork that proves it. Watch for it being quietly borrowed for computers that have nothing to do with records. And remember that the surcharge rises and falls with the real estate market. Plan your base tranche on a slow year, and treat a busy recording year as a chance to pull later work forward rather than as a new normal.

Grants

Grants suit discrete, well-defined projects: a professional survey, a pilot imaging project, conservation of a single map collection, a disaster plan. They are poor at paying recurring costs, and most require matching funds or in-kind effort that you will need to budget for. For government records, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and your state historical records advisory board are the usual starting points. State archives and state humanities councils sometimes run smaller programs, and local community foundations are often overlooked and lighter on paperwork. Never build your base on grants. Use them to speed the plan up, and write each application so the funded project slots into a specific year of the ten-year table.

Operating and capital budgets

The base appropriation matters, however small, because it shows the town owns the problem. Environmental work such as HVAC, fire suppression and new shelving usually belongs in the capital plan, which runs on its own calendar. Get the vault onto the capital list early. Those lists are long, and they move slowly.

The ten-year plan on one page

Here is the skeleton I would hand a board. Instead of dollars it uses units, where 10 units is your steady annual base. A unit in a small town and a unit in a large county are very different sums, and I would rather not pretend otherwise.

The lighter years are deliberate. Units saved in years 1, 7 and 10 go into a reserve, because something will go wrong over a decade: a burst pipe, a failed compressor, a volume in far worse shape than anyone thought. If water ever does get into the room, our piece on the first 48 hours after water damage is worth printing and taping inside the vault door.

Reporting back to the board

The annual report is where a ten-year program lives or dies, because the people who approved year one will not all be around for year six. Keep it to two pages and keep the same shape every year:

• a short paragraph at the top explaining what the program is and why it exists, written for someone who has just joined the board
• what was planned for the year and what was actually done
• what it cost against the plan, and why any difference occurred
• running totals: volumes treated, volumes imaged, shelf feet rehoused, share of the top tier finished
• two or three photographs, before and after
• anything the work uncovered, such as a hidden mold problem, missing volumes or an unreadable reel of film
• next year's tranche, already matched to the ten-year table

Then invite the board into the vault. Nothing I ever put in a report did as much good as letting a selectman hold a deed book whose spine came away in his hands, followed by one that had just come back from the bindery. For more on presenting to elected officials, see our guide to preservation workshops and making the case for funding.

Mistakes I would avoid

• One giant contract with no checkpoints. Multi-year agreements are fine, but inspect and accept each year's work before paying for it.
• Treating volumes nobody uses while the indexes fall apart. Index books are often the most handled volumes in the room and the least glamorous to fund.
• Imaging before stabilizing. If a volume cannot open safely, scanning it can do the very damage you were trying to prevent.
• Stabilizing without imaging. Rebind a book and send it straight back to the counter, and you will be rebinding it again.
• Forgetting the room. Treatment money spent in a damp vault is money you will spend twice.
• Letting the surcharge fund become a slush fund. The first time it pays for something unrelated, it becomes much easier to do it again.

None of this requires a preservation department. It requires a ranked list, a steady request and the stubbornness to turn up every budget season with the same plan and a few new photographs. After the third year, the board starts asking where the photographs are.