Assessments of Preservation Today: In recognition of the changing needs of a maturing preservation movement, three major assessments of the achievements and failures of the preservation efforts of the past two decades have been published. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation 1986 annual report to Congress, "Twenty Years of the National Historic Preservation Act" (Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, 1986), details not only the accomplishments of the preservation community since the enactment of the NHPA in 1966, but also the contemporary challenges to the integrity of our cultural heritage. In 1986, at the direction of the U.S. Congress, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) investigated the deficiencies of contemporary cultural resource management practices. The resulting report, "Technologies for Prehistoric and Historic Preservation" (U.S. Congress, 1986), provides an account of the inadequacies of contemporary conservation tools and strategies in the face of increasingly complex cultural resource management issues. Similarly, "The American Mosaic: Preserving a Nation's Heritage" (Stipe and Lee, 1987), provides an alarming overview of the extensive technical needs and socioeconomic problems confronting the preservation community in the United States. While these publications appropriately celebrate the significant political and economic successes achieved by the preservation movement over the past two decades, they are a sobering assessment of the substantial challenges that continue to frustrate effective cultural resource management. In substance, these three major reports are in essential agreement that these challenges are most pronounced in the fields of education, data acquisition and management, and information dissemination. Accordingly, these reports propose that new strategies are required to overcome these persistent challenges, strategies that capitalize on the sophisticated tools and techniques made available to the preservation professions through the mechanism of technology transfer. Nonrenewable loss Benefits: Economic Threats to Resources Premise: A Basis for Action