Jacob Nadal has been the Director for Preservation for the last seven years. As his time at the Library comes to a close, he sets down his thoughts about preservation and leadership and says a warm farewell.
In 2022, a software company operating a library inventory management system went out of business, leaving several large libraries in the lurch. Over the last couple years, the Library of Congress, along with other libraries in the ReCAP Consortium got together to create FETCH, a new inventory management system.
The ALA Annual Meeting starts on June 27th this year. Preservation staff will be presenting at a few different events and would love to talk to fellow attendees.
Preservation staff will be presenting several papers at the American Institute of Conservation annual meeting starting May 20th. Come say hello and hear about topics such as scientific analysis of books from libraries around the country, non-invasive analysis of texts and images of medieval manuscripts, collection surveys, and conservation of an architectural model.
On Friday, March 8th, staff from each division of the Preservation Directorate were invited onstage at Washington, D.C.’s comic convention, Awesome Con, to speak about their work at the Library as part of the convention’s Science Fair. This is their story.
Learn about the Library of Congress’ book detectives. This team of Collection Specialists works within the Collections Management Division (CMD) to find the requested items that have gone missing from their shelf location.
The Manuscript Map of the Dagua River Region, created in 1764, depicts a remote gold mining frontier in today’s Colombia. Art historian Juliet Wiersema and preservation scientist Meghan Hill will share results from their collaborative analysis which unearthed stories about African resilience, resistance, adaptation, entrepreneurship, and survival within the Spanish empire. A scientific examination of this map further draws back the curtain on how this large watercolor map was assembled using pigments and paper from across the empire.
In 2017, Jeanne Drewes, began an independent oral history project as part of the Occupational Folklife Project to document the occupational trade and work-related experiences of professional bookbinders. Now available, the interviews document the histories of individual binderies, trace intertwined firm histories, and encourage interviewees to discuss how the binders’ occupation and the preservation of books have changed over the years.