Moving the focus point: from conservation treatment to preventive conservation

Today preservation and conservation theories and practices have to deal with larger collections in terms of number of items, and variegated collections as regards to the type of materials. Careful planning is required for carrying out various activities for the preservation and access of texts especially in the current economical situation, bearing in mind that even if conservation treatments have been greatly improved during the last few decades, they must be evaluated in a broader context. This paper focuses on the difficulties involved in caring for collections and discusses the aspects of prioritizing and decision-making: when dealing with collection preservation, the curator must be capable of evaluating the vulnerability of collections and developing long-term preservation strategies.