The task of preserving huge quantities of paper records may appear so overwhelming that an archivist does not know where to begin or how best to use limited resources. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, an archival preservationist, a statistician, and an operations research engineer address those difficulties and offer theory and practice and a model for reducing the overall paper preservation problem into manageable and efficient subtasks. Based on a U.S. National Archives/National Bureau of Standards study, the archival/conservation principles employed are: sample surveying, careful planning, protective packaging, use of copies instead of originals, monitoring the conditions of records as they are being used, and professional conservation treatment.