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Posted by: Lily Tyndall
Read a personal interview with an objects conservator at the Library of Congress, Liz Peirce. Liz talks about her experiences working in conservation at the Library, her educational and professional background, her projects at the Library, and advice for aspiring conservators.
Posted in: Care and Handling, Collections Care, Conservation, Preservation
Posted by: Bobbi Hinton
How do we preserve open reel audio tapes? How quickly are they breaking down? Recently published work from a collaborative study between scientists at the Library and colleagues at FUJIFILM shows that many of these historic tapes are likely sticking around for a while.
Posted in: Music, Preservation, Sound Recordings, Tangible Media
Posted by: Amelia Parks
Preservation administration is much like other types of management and administration, except that our bottom line isn’t financial profit. Instead, the goal comes in two parts: maximize the usability of collections in the present tense, and do that in ways that improve their odds of usability in the future. Read on to see how see how the Preservation Directorate is changing approaches to functional organization and budget planning to achieve these goals at the Library of Congress.
Posted in: Collections Care, Collections Management, Preservation
Posted by: Aaron D. Chaletzky
This is a guest post written by Amanda May, Digital Projects Specialist in the Preservation Services Division. Her work includes managing digital files for the division, recovering data from removable media in Library collections, and providing consultation and services for born-digital collections data. Born-digital preservation work most often begins with a physical object – a …
Posted in: Born Digital, Collections Management, Preservation, Reformatting, Tangible Media, Uncategorized
Posted by: Chloe Genter
The de-installation of gallery objects is often a process not typically seen by the public. This post offers insight into what is involved in order to successfully carry out such a large undertaking.
Posted in: Care and Handling, Collections Care, Conservation, Preservation
Posted by: Amelia Parks
One unique and CHARMing collection at The Library of Congress is made up of other peoples’ discards, handmade replicas, and miscellany. A non-collection as it were, it is an amalgamation of reference samples and materials used by preservation scientists to expand discovery and research opportunities.
Posted in: Heritage Science, Preservation
Posted by: Lily Tyndall
Read more to learn about the Nelson W. Jordan Family Papers, a collection of correspondence, scrapbooks, genealogical information, and more from this important African-American family. Nelson W. Jordan was born a slave, and was a soldier and a minister; his family continued to be active community members in Virginia and New Jersey. This post details the conservation treatment of crayon enlargements depicting the family's patriarch, Nelson Jordan, and two of his daughters, Julia and Carrie.
Posted in: Collections Care, Conservation, Preservation
Posted by: Aaron D. Chaletzky
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world with over 173 million cataloged items. For the past decade, digitization of this enormous collection has increased exponentially. The Preservation Services Division (PSD) is responsible for a huge portion of this effort, managing contracts for the digitization of millions of pages of books, newspapers, and microfilm frames each year. All of this imaging results in a lot of data, hundreds of millions of files, and this is how we manage that data.
Posted in: Collections Management, Preservation, Reformatting, Tools of the Trade, Uncategorized
Posted by: Amelia Parks
The following is a blog post written by Mo Mathers, a remote Fall 2022 Washington Center intern with the Preservation Directorate. Mo is in their final year at San Jose State University pursuing a master’s in library and Information Science with an emphasis on instructional design. The Preservation Directorate is a unique facet of the Library …
Posted in: Internships, Preservation