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Don’t listen to the “paperless office” rhetoric. If it’s that “paperless” how come printer sales are going through the roof and an ever increasing number of books are published every year?

Just like TV did not replace radio, digital media and computers will never replace books. These two media, paper and digital, will continue to exist side by side just like TV and the radio.

Just like the digital media faces the peril of getting wiped away and thus need to backed up regularly, paper also has its enemy - time.

Millions of rare and valuable volumes are crumbling away in the nation’s libraries and museums, and are attacked by mold, mildew, humidity, bugs, rats, and worse.

The chief culprit is the WOODEN PULP which has a very high acid content.

Did you know that most of the books published between 1840 and 1980 are printed on high-acid paper manufactured from wood pulp?

That’s why about 120 million volumes are getting cracked and brittle with every passing day. Some just disintegrate when you lift them up and open their cover. They are like very old patients that need to be handled and treated extremely gently.

There are various book restoration centers and programs around the United States and one good one is at Sheridan Libraries Preservation Department of Johns Hopkins University. Here, trained students and curators do their best, resources and funds permitting, to bring some of decaying treasures of the past back to life.

However, a change of mentality across the land is probably what’s needed to save this precious link we have to the recorded past. Most of us do not think of a book as something that needs “service.”

“To have a library without an active preservation department is like buying a Rolls Royce and never taking it to be serviced,” is how Johns Hopkins faculty member Stephen G. Nichols put it in the latest issue of the JOHNS HOPKINS Magazine (June 2006, pp. 32-28). “For some reason, people think books don’t need to be serviced, but that is just not the case.”

Given the lack of adequate resources to save all the rare books facing extinction, someone suggested that “perhaps encapsulating a little-used damaged book in mylar could be the best way to preserve it until it’s needed by a user” (ibid, p.38).

I also have a suggestion:

Since most of the damage occurs due to the presence of humidity, mildew or certain other microorganisms in the AIR, can these books be saved by keeping them in VACUUM CHAMBERS?

No air, no decay, it seems to me. And in the meanwhile average users can access these treasures through their digitized copies on the Internet.

Ugur Akinci, Ph.D. is a Creative Copywriter, Editor, an experienced and award-winning Technical Communicator specializing in fundraising packages, direct sales copy, web content, press releases, movie reviews and hi-tech documentation. He has worked as a Technical Writer for Fortune 100 companies for the last 7 years.

In addition to being an Ezine Articles Expert Author, he is also a Senior Member of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), and a Member of American Writers and Artists Institute (AWAI).

You can reach him at writer111@gmail.com for a FREE consultation on all your copywriting needs.

You are most welcomed to visit his official web site http://www.writer111.com for more information on his multidisciplinary background, writing career, and client testimonials. While at it, you might also want to check the latest book he has edited: http://www.lulu.com/content/263630

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A Journey into the Heroic Environment: A Personal Guide to Creating a Work Environment Built on Shared Values, 3rd Edition

Rob Lebow (SelectBooks, New York 2004 1590790618) $21.95

REVIEWED BY SHARIF KHAN

Living in what Alan Greenspan called an era of “infectious greed” with corporate titans facing serious jail time, Ex-WorldCom CEO, Bernard Ebbers, leading the way facing life behind bars, and sobering laws in place such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act making ethics and values increasingly important components in every organization, it would do well to learn how to help organizations create heroic environments based on higher standards of excellence. Mr. Rob Lebow, former Director of Corporate Communications for Microsoft, with over twenty years experience helping companies implement his Shared Values Process to create what he calls, a Freedom-Based Workplace, attempts to do just that for readers in his book, “A Journey into the Heroic Environment.”

Resurrecting an abandoned, ‘failed,’ 1972 study, undertaken by graduate students from the social psychology department of a major United States university, with over 17 million survey responses from workers and managers in 40 countries and over 32 Standard Industrial Codes, that was not able to reveal any conclusive connection between job satisfaction and individual or organizational performance, Mr. Lebow’s research team started their own investigation. Bringing a fresh perspective to the study, Lebow realized that the key to solving the mystery of overcoming cultural challenges to create exceptional levels of performance, was not going to be found in the hard numbers and statistics of the survey, but in the actual, literal comments of all the participants. Using this creative intelligence, Lebow indexed the most often addressed topics in all the discarded surveys by country. And the revelation was that all the surveys from the different countries mentioned the same subjects. This became the Lebow Company’s 20th Century Rosetta Stone that finally cracked the code to the secrets of unlocking high performance that were embedded in the previously undecipherable 17 million worldwide surveys that the original research missed.

Under the scrutiny of this new lens, the Lebow research group discovered that it was Values, not job satisfaction issues, which resided at the core between performance and what managers and workers were really looking for. Lebow’s research suggested that there were eight values that all people respected throughout the world regardless of race, religion, nationality, industry, gender, educational level, or organizational status. Furthermore, the Lebow research group concluded: “that these eight Shared Valuesrepresent the major factors that contribute not only to job satisfaction and employee morale, but to an organization’s performance, competitiveness, speed to change, innovation at every level, willingness to learn new things, and overall operational success. [That] this was the universal Cultural Return On Investment (ROI) linking people to performance.”

While the author does not mention exactly how he came to this revolutionary conclusion, he claims that the correlation between organizational performance and these Shared Values has been tested and validated with over 2,300 organizational sites. These universal Shared Values which Lebow calls The Eight Principles of the Heroic Environment

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