It’s Preservation Week! How are you celebrating it?

It’s Preservation Week! How are you celebrating it?

Attending an event at your local library?

Holding an event?

Thinking about some of your own personal collections that may need preservation treatment to pass on?

Even though our blog focuses on the preservation of digital materials, we are about raising awareness and promoting preservation-related activities.

That’s why this afternoon, I attended the first Preservation Week event here at the Library of Congress. Our Library’s Preservation Directorate, which works to ensure the long-term care and access to collections in original or reformatted form, screened a 1980’s film about the history of the Library’s preservation activities at that time.

The film highlighted the innovative methods and best practices used 30 years ago to care, restore and preserve the Library’s collections,  such as the binding methods for library materials, the detailed steps involved in microfilming collections, and the deacidification  process to protect books.  Whether nostalgic to some or vintage to others, it literally showed our organization has come a long-way while maintaining our core mission.

The Library is holding more educational and informational events this week, including seminars and webinars.

If you’re looking for events or activities in your area, ALA’s Preservation Week event map is a fantastic resource.

And if you’re awareness has been raised, you can learn to care for you personal collections at home. Here are some good “starting-out” informational resources, whether you are caring for physical objects, digitizing photos, or saving your personal digital materials.

• Library of Congress, Preservation Directorate: Caring for Your Family Treasures:  Learn about the importance of caring and protecting everyday family treasures, as well information and links to other resources.
• Beginning Digitization Principles for Restoring Old Photographs: A blog post from Familysearch.org discussing considerations when scanning old photographs.
• Personal Digital Archiving: This site provides some tips to help make your personal “born digital” information last.