The poet John Milton famously said that books are the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, but with our current girth of information, how will we preserve this knowledge in the long term? While technology has made digitization of books possible, the conversion to digital surrogates does not resolve the controversial question of where and how we should preserve our vast collections of original source materials. We may strive to keep every book, document and artifact in a library but financial and physical constraints often make such a goal impossible. The question we have before us today is not only “What do we select to preserve?” but more importantly, “What do we select not to preserve, and how do we make these decisions?”