The mission of the Joint Task Force on Text and Image was to inquire into the problems, needs, and methods for preserving images in text that are important for scholarship in a wide range of disciplines and to draw from that exploration a set of principles, guidelines, and recommendations for a comprehensive national strategy for image preservation. During its 2-year inquiry, the task force studied the cognitive relationships between words and pictures; the basic attributes of images; and the distribution of images in books and periodicals during the time when acidic paper was used for scholarly publication. The task force also informally surveyed its own membership and colleagues regarding types of images found in publications in the disciplines of anatomy, architecture, art history, cultural history, entomology, geology, history (general) medieval archaeology, and photographic history in various periods between 1850 and 1950. It was concluded that high contrast black-and-white microfilm techniques can be used for preserving most of the books in the 1850-1880 era when most of the illustrations were line cuts or drawings; black-and-white microfilming does not reproduce half tone illustrations satisfactorily for scholarly purposes, and the available alternatives (color and continuous tone filming, electronic scanning and bit-mapped storage) require further study; the available information on the number and types of images in various kind of publications in various epochs is insufficient and undependable for large ranges of time and materials; and further information is needed on the effectiveness, costs, and requirements of alternative technologies for preservation of post-1880 text-cum-image material. (BBM)