The Preservation Department is gearing up for a big summer of education. In addition to the annual arrival of summer interns, we’re having a series of in-house classes for our career staff. I’m excited about this – we brought on three staff members from the Acquisitions department about a year ago. They all had done some wiork with our bindery services as part of their jobs, so it made sense to fold them into preservation, once that department was established.
Over the last year, they’ve expanded from just serials binding to manage the ongoing bindery services for monographic repairs, theses & dissertations, and they’ve done some big pamphlet binding and enclosures projects, too. In the future, we’ve been talking about other contract services they could manage, such as reformatting (including books, photos, audio and video recordings), as well as other preservation needs like surveys and environmental monitoring.
As a next step towards those ends, this summer we’re going to take all of our technicians through, essentially, a graduate-level course on preservation. Today, we’re starting with some history and context. I’ve posted our handout below. This may not make perfect sense without sitting in the class, but you can probably get the gist of what we’re talking about.
Preservation History and Context Handout – PDF (139KB)
