The article addresses the problems of preserving archival artifacts, i.e., books and documents (e.g. hand-drawn maps, bookbindings, legal documents, books on such subjects as history and geology, whose original formats have scholarly value as objects). Microfilming is not an adequate preservation technology for artifacts as it cannot reproduce the original format. The author discusses how to identify artifacts and evaluate their importance to scholarship and weighs up strategies for their preservation, emphasizing the need for measures to reduce rates of deterioration.