Preservation Week starts April 24th and it’s one of our favorite times of the year! The trees are blooming and it’s time for the Preservation Directorate to fling open our (virtual) doors and welcome you inside. We see Preservation Week as our opportunity to draw back the curtain and let you see what happens behind the scenes.
For those of you who don’t know, Preservation Week is an initiative of the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). Every year, collecting institutions across the country put on events that highlight the preservation work they do. These events provide insight to any topic from professional preservation practices such as environmental monitoring or conservation, as well as smaller scale preservation projects, like preserving family photographs and scrapbooks. So make sure you check in with your favorite local library, archive, or museum and see if they are offering programing this week.
This year the Library of Congress is presenting five webinars featuring some of the preservation work we have done this past year, across all of our divisions. We are starting the week off by looking at the non-invasive examination techniques utilized by Preservation Research and Testing in reading rooms at the Library. These portable tools help answer curatorial and researcher questions by expanding our knowledge of collection materials. On Tuesday, you can learn about one of the earliest forms of photography, the daguerreotype, and see some items from one of the Library’s recent acquisitions, a collection of items from photographic pioneer Robert Cornelius. Wednesday, the Preservation Services Division will give an overview of the wide variety of reformatting and digitization projects they perform and see a sample of some of our online collections. On Thursday, the Collection Management Division will discuss some of the intricacies and complications of moving collections to offsite storage. We will be wrapping our week up with a presentation on how the Library manages its preservation programs in response to changes by restructuring department responsibilities and evaluating program costs. If any of these pique your interest you can find the complete descriptions and registration links on our Preservation Week webpage. As an added bonus, we have past recordings available on the same page.
And don’t worry, if five webinars leave you wanting even more preservation information, we have you covered. The ALA has a couple of webinars on preservation’s role in environmental sustainability and the Society of American Archivists is hosting a Twitter conference on Wednesday, which you can follow by using #PresTC22. It’s shaping up to be an exciting week this year, hope to see you there!
All Library of Congress Preservation Week webinars will be recorded and posted on our website, this process usually takes a couple months. You can find all our past recordings here.
Please request ADA accommodations for the Library of Congress webinars at least five business days in advance by contacting (202) 707-6362 or [email protected].