> This reads like a massive excusatio non petita.
You did post a very short take on a public forum.
> I think it's very clear that the sector is often struggling under the weight of its own size
That's an opinion.
> You just have to check newspapers for the continuous stream of news about missing books and other niche artefacts, from England to Italy or anywhere real
That's anecdata at best, unless you can quantify that, qualify those perceived losses in terms of their real or perceived value, and how that relates to collection management.
> In some cases, like the Girolamini library in Napoli, employees set up whole operations that go on for months or years. Salaries in the sector, as I'm sure you know, are rarely spectacular.
The preservation of heritage is a reflection of how a society perceives the value of that heritage. That's the hard part. The notion that it's possible to preserve all valuable items for centuries in top notch conditions is a pipe dream. The reality is that preservation and valorization of heritage is - ultimately - tied into a social, economic, political, cultural even religious context. And that context shifts constantly.
What happened in Italy is a disgrace. It happened as a result of defunding and lack of oversight. The italian state isn't a rich nation. It suffers massive debts, it's politics are turbulent and law enforcement is a huge challenge. At the same time, it's not an unique situation is this also happens in other countries where state actors aren't in a position to safeguard heritage properly.
> The challenge gets harder and harder, particularly for the thousands of small institutions scattered around provincial Europe.
See: above. For all the perceived stability of European nations, fact is that public actors in Europe suffer just the same effects of macro-economic, social and political dynamics as elsewhere. Small institutions don't struggle because of their own doing. They struggle because public budgets have been slashed over the past decades, over and over again.
> while history continues to produce larger and larger amount of items to preserve.
Again, that's where curation comes into play. Also, do you really believe that the items and artefacts stored in Cambridge constitute the bulk of cultural production over the past millennium? Reality is far more prozaic: it's a certainty that lots of items and objects we don't even know they ever existed have gone lost to time.
It's also pretty much par for the course that recent times will yield far larger volume of items. Not everything can, will or even should be preserved. Loss is inevitable. That's not an admission to stop trying, rather it's an acknowledgement that institutions can only operate on their mission within the bounds of the resources they have at their disposal.
And yes, that might entail acknowledging that there's a chance items of a massive collection might go missing with no-one readily noticing immediately.
It's also why insurance is a huge and fraught topic in the heritage industry.
> Which is why I simply expressed the hope that, at some point, the problem can be solved with an increased amount of technology, simply because human systems, even when populated by the best of the best, just tend to fail at scale.
Digitization has it's uses. Undeniable. But the reality is that registration and cataloguing is an arduous task that can't be automated. It's also a very expensive task since you need qualified domain experts to do it correctly / properly.
Technology can assist us, but it can never replace human labor in this process of preservation.