I was sorting through a couple bins of damaged books from the Young Research Library yesterday and came across a 1957 edition of S.R. Ranganathan’s the Five Laws of Library Science (Madras, India: Madras Library Association, 1957). The half title page included the fabulous illustration above used by the Madras Library Association.
S.R. Ranganathan was a president of the Madras Library Association, but I don’t know if he was at the time this logo was designed or when the book was published. He also had a brilliant mind – one of the greatest in the library field ever.
It had been a very long time since I had thought about Ranganathan. I was introduced to his work as a library school student at the University of Texas at Austin during my Intro to Libraries class. But as I flipped through the book, I read again the Five Laws he published first in 1931. To my mind they are still completely relevant to everything we do here in the library and in preservation and conservation (regardless of the medium being used). Here they are:
I wanted to share a video of a presentation that the Preservation Unit gave on February 15, 2012 to the UCLA Library Collections Council. While the video explains what the Preservation Unit does and introduces the major players, there has been a huge change since this presentation was given: our fearless leader Jacob Nadal has left UCLA Library for the Brooklyn Historical Society. While we are very sad about this, we are at least somewhat consoled by the very happy news that as of the beginning of April 2012, Dawn Aveline has joined the Preservation Department as Preservation Specialist.
Dawn joins the UCLA Library Preservation Program full-time after a year and a half serving as part-time graduate assistant in the department. As Preservation Specialist, she will expand her involvement in activities such as environmental monitoring, the replacement or reformatting of embrittled books, and oversight of bindery operations. She will work closely with Conservator Kristen St. John to support the overall care of the Library’s collections and the continuing development of the Preservation Program.
Thanks to Marty Brennan for shooting and editing the video.
Allow me to introduce myself to the readers of the UCLA Library’s Preservation Blog: my name is Siobhan Hagan, and I am the UCLA Library’s new Audiovisual Preservation Specialist (full disclosure: I started in July of 2011, so I am not as “new” as you might think). In Latin, “audio, video, disco” means “I hear, I see, I learn”. I love obsolete things, like Latin and Umatic videocassettes, so I strive for each and every day in my job to include some element of a Disco: to remember that learning is fun, especially in the light of a darkened room with flickers and strobes of unique moving images and sounds.
I have been very busy here in the last few months! A lot of it has been observing, planning, traveling, shopping (!), organizing, and communicating. I didn’t want to write a blog post until I had some really interesting AV content to post, but I now realize that this is not necessary for an interesting post (and that it will take a lot longer to work out). Let me update you all on the major things I have been doing, and then I will post updates more regularly from here on out. How about one thing for each month that I have been at UCLA? Okay:
1. Getting to know the UCLA Campus and Library ins and outs: still working on this one! I must say that I have totally mastered the BruinBus. And getting to know all the great people here has probably been one of my favorite parts: everyone was so excited to have me here–I had a great welcome.
2. I was able to attend the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ (AMIA) The Reel Thing and Digital Asset Symposium (DAS). It was my second Reel Thing and my first DAS. It’s been great to be in LA where the AMIA organization is based for these and other events!
3. Scavenging for and purchasing AV equipment and supplies: sometimes people just give it away, and sometimes it costs a large amount of money. The ultimate goal is to have in-house playback and reformatting capabilities for select audiovisual formats.
4. I went to the AMIA annual conference in Austin, Texas (this was my 4th). I visited lots of places with AV collections in Texas and then the east coast (my home sweet home), including NARA, Library of Congress in Culpeper, the Smithsonian Institute Archives, and the New York Public Library, just to name a few. My main goal from this trip was to learn the failures and successes that these places had with their AV preservation programs so that the UCLA Library could learn from others’ mistakes and achievements.
5. Working with outside vendors on audio reformatting projects: this has taken up a huge amount of my time, but it has been a lot of fun to get my hands on the great collections. Stay tuned for some audio from the Perlich, SOUL Magazine, Newquist, and Ojai Music Festival Collections coming soon to our Digital Collections!
6. Co-wrote a National Film Preservation Foundation Basic Preservation grant proposal for a film from the Synanon Collection. We should find out if we got the funds in the summer, so I will keep you posted.
7. All of this preservation reformatting has led to many discussions regarding proper (and a lot of it) digital storage, metadata, and dissemination. This was already an issue being dealt with in the library upon my arrival, but I brought it to a whole new level since digital AV files are much larger than digital photos or documents.
8. Working on developing ares of cooperation, selection, capture, preservation, and access of live events that happen at the library such as lectures, workshops, performances, and other types of meetings. The plan right now is to start with the capture of events at the freshly renovated Young Research Library, and then use that experience to guide the performance capture and preservation across the library and the UCLA campus.
9. Visited the San Francisco area to visit places with AV Collections with the same goals in mind as my previous Texas/east coast trip. I also attended the Personal Digital Archiving Conference at the Internet Archive and got ridiculously excited by all of the television news preservation that they are doing there!
I probably left some things out, but you get the picture: things are happening at the UCLA Library with AV Preservation!
The UCLA Library Preservation Department is offering a conservation pre-program internship for qualified students who are applying for Masters-level training in conservation. This internship will provide experience to pre-program students or individuals currently in graduate level conservation programs in conservation decision making, treatment and documentation for library and archival collections. The conservation intern will work under the supervision of the collections conservator to perform repair or make enclosures for materials selected from the collections. Relevant literature will be reviewed prior to conservation treatment and all projects will be documented.
Application deadline is April 13, 2012
The UCLA Library Preservation Department supports the Library’s mission to develop, organize, and preserve collections for optimal use. The Preservation Department provides stewardship for the intellectual record in the formats required by contemporary scholars and ensures the safekeeping of the artifacts that are entrusted to the UCLA Library. The Preservation Department includes the Library Conservation Center (LCC), a state-of-the-art conservation lab that provides conservation services collections in all units of the UCLA Library. The LCC is guided by the best current practices of the book and paper conservation field and the Code of Ethics of the American Institute for the Conservation of Artistic and Historic works.
For examples of preservation department activities, visit:
http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/preservation
These internships are 75% FTE (30 hours/week) for an eight week period, with a flexible start date.
Interns will be hired as Limited Appointment employees, with a salary rate of $2418.00/mo. (full-time rate) and will be eligible for UCLA Core level benefits.
Please submit a letter of interest, a current resume, and contact information for three professional references to:
Kristen St.John
Collections Conservator
UCLA Library Conservation Center
Box 957230, 11000 Kinross Ave., #126
Los Angeles, CA 90095-7230
Application deadline is April 13, 2012
The UCLA Library is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action/ADA-compliant employer. Under federal law, the University of California may employ only individuals who are legally authorized to work in the United States as established by providing documents specified in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
I had the pleasure of speaking with a class taught by Jean-François Blanchette last week. It was such a good experience that I’m getting two posts out of it, in fact. In this one, I want to give some scope to an idea that I mentioned to them in passing. It’s become a standard part of my fundamentals of digital preservation teaching and I think it’s time to give it some air here on the web.
It’s a commonplace to say that we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. As someone who thinks about both of these things every day, I contend that the opposite may be true. I find it useful to think about all preservation efforts within a shared theoretical framework and then try to identify the specific technical knowledge required to make that framework sit up and stay forever.
Post by Caitlyn McLoughlin
While I am not a MLIS student, I am most definitely a student of the library, and this project has been a rewarding lesson. Because I’m one of those lucky dorks who loves her job more than most things, I jumped at the opportunity to increase my hours as a Conservation Lab assistant this past summer. My increased presence in the lab inspired my supervisors, Wil Lin and Kristen St. John, to ask around the UCLA library community for potential projects that could be completed over the summer. Enter Janine Henri, Architecture, Design, and Digital Services Librarian. She explained that there were a number of books in the Arts Library Cage stacks that needed to be transferred to SRLF for permanent housing. But before this could happen, enclosures needed to be created for the books – which were not just books, but GIANT books. The average book measures around 20” x 14” and weighs somewhere between 10 – 12 lbs.
Looking back on my experience with the UCLA Library Conservation Center is extremely rewarding. My first day, Kristen St. John and I sat down and discussed the different projects I’d be able to work on this summer and what I was most interested in. I’m glad to have been able to accomplish such a wide range of activities in the eight weeks I’ve been here with a focus on hand skills and condition survey.
The last time I wrote, I had just begun my 8-week summer preservation internship at UCLA. Now I am at the end of my experience and looking for a way to adequately summarize 2 months of practical experience, learning opportunities, long-term projects and one-time assignments.
Emilia at Madam Tussaud's, Hollywood, with Our (Wax) President.
Over the course of the summer I had two big projects. The first of these was helping the libraries’ begin their Business Continuity Plans. In my previous post I described Business Continuity Planning (or BCP for short) as I understood it at the time. Since that time my understanding of BCP has gained depth, as I attended meetings at various libraries on campus, did outside readings, listened to talks and, finally, helped the preservation department and the SRLF (Southern Regional Library Facility) work on their plans using the UCReady tool.
I gave a talk for the Amigos “Digital Preservation: What’s Now? What’s Next” conference today in which I trotted out what I consider one of my better formulations of (one of) the model(s) I use for thinking about preservation. This model says that preservation consists in sustainable efforts, optimized over time. The change is from thinking of “preservation” and “preserved” as closed efforts or checklists of pre-defined actions to be completed. Instead, the focus is on ranking the “preservation” of things and having a process for “preserving” them.
With that distinction made, it becomes clearer that preservation/preserving is a function of strategy and management and that preserved/preservable is a function of technical knowledge about the specific types of objects in an archives’ care. For the strategic side of the process, I think Snowden and Kurtz’ Cynefin model is the most useful thing going, closely followed by Shenton and the British Library’s work on Life-cycle Collection Mangement.
For the objects themselves, I propose the following model:
Substrate: tangible substance(s) that carries media
Media: material(s) that record information
Transport: means(s) for perceiving media
Language: system(s) for interpretation of media
In this way, digital preservation and artifactual preservation can be dealt with as different instances of the same basic problem. Preservation succeeds when failures in all four factors are eliminated, corrected, or mitigated and there is a sustainable process in place that will support prevention and repair or recovery at appropriate times.
Hello, esteemed readers! This is Dawn Aveline reporting to you from the summer after completing my first year in UCLA’s MLIS program. Since last fall, I’ve had the good fortune of working with Jake in the Preservation Department, as a preservation assistant. The job encompasses a variety of preservation-related duties that often change from week to week. My tasks range from querying WorldCat holdings, searching for out-of-print books, gathering environmental data, to helping coordinate digitization projects. On occasion I’ve even been known to jump in as a pinch-hit pamphlet binder in the Conservation Lab. It’s always interesting around here! Exposure to this broad range of issues in preservation administration has become an essential part of my education.
Earlier this year I tackled one of my more intriguing assignments and I am excited to share some images of it with you. This project involved examining a number of craft paper bundles that had been sent to Preservation. At some point in the past, these newsprint materials had been gathered together and wrapped up in preparation for a move; it was up to me to open each bundle and provide a condition assessment of the contents.
