This slender volume—which, speaking of cost analysis, comes to about $0.81 per page—when used by library managers to determine preservation costs could rapidly pay for itself, as an indirect cost of an item (after first determining whether it is supply or equipment) that could be amortized out over at least five years!

In all seriousness, this is a valuable work for any person in charge of preservation efforts, with too many resources needing preservation and too little money and staff to do all the work. The digital side of preservation (such as scanning heavy-use, hard-copy materials in order to have the hard-copy items less handled and therefore preserved) is included in the concept of preservation work.

The focuses of the writing style are clarity and brevity, with use of tables, examples, and bulleted lists to make points clear with a minimum investment of the reader’s time. For example, Chapter 1, “The Role of Cost Analysis in Preservation” (1–2) is two pages long and is remarkably to the point. Chapter 2, “A Methodology for Cost Analysis” (3–5) is almost as brief; it lists and expands upon the eight major steps of the costing process—define item to be costed, understand purpose of costing exercise, determine cost basis, gather information on work process, identify and quantify cost components, calculate cost, document assumptions, and perform reasonableness tests. In Chapter 3, “Identifying and Calculating Costs” (7–28), we get to the difficult work of costing supplies and equipment, services, labor, and indirect costs, and in Chapter 4 (29–39) there are two costing exercises, one for deacidification and one for phase-box creation. The latter is especially helpful because it gives two different costing examples, one for in-house work and the other for outsourcing of the work.

In Chapters 5 (“Review of the Literature on Cost Analysis,” 41–46) and 6 (“Selected Annotated Bibliography,” 47–56), the authors perform this reviewer’s work, by listing related works and discussing them. While there has been extensive work on cost analysis of library operations, there seems not to be any other publication exactly like this one on cost analysis of preservation in libraries. The last chapter is divided up by subject (preservation literature, subdivided into general, binding, deacidification, digitization, and microfilming; library literature; technical services literature, subdivided into general and cataloging; and business literature). Each citation has an approximately one-hundred-word annotation. The digitization section of two pages (the largest section in this chapter) includes the major works with which this reviewer is familiar, plus several more citations which the reviewer intends to pursue.

This is a work that will immediately be put into use in this reviewer’s collection. While reading the work, occasionally I would think, “But that’s an obvious point,” and then realize it was obvious only because I have worked in libraries for thirty-five years and for the last ten of them have relatively frequently performed cost analysis of providing services. For persons new to doing cost analysis, this work can shortcut the learning experience and make it possible to avoid painful learning experiences.