The Library of Congress hosted the “From Jikji to Gutenberg Scholarly Colloquium” on April 13–14, 2023. My opening remarks are available to view on YouTube and a transcript is included below.
Continue reading Remarks for the Jikji to Gutenberg Colloquium
My Special Assistant, Erin Engle, and I presented our work on preservation program planning at Kuopio 7, on Sept. 7, 2022. A video of the talk is available and a related paper will be published in Library Management along with a pre-print available from this site.
Abstract: The Library of Congress is engaged in an effort to ensure the health and sustainability of its preservation program. This presentation will explain how the preservation management team re-evaluated and re-imagined its work through a series of workshops, cost studies, and planning exercises. This has led to a new way to respond to changes in immediate operational requirements across strategic planning cycles, while still making progress on large-scale preservation needs. This includes planning for the workforce and fiscal resources needed to maintain a rich array of options for use of the collections over the long term.
I presented work on fiscal and organizational planning for sustaining the Library of Congress’ preservation program at the 10th anniversary conference of the Koordinierungsstelle für die Erhaltung des schriftlichen Kulturguts (KEK), on Sept. 23, 2021. A video of the talk is available on YouTube and a proceedings is forthcoming. A pre-print is available here.
I gave remarks for the opening of the 35th International Association of Paper Historians Congress, June 7–11, 2021, hosted by the Library of Congress and our interagency partners at the National Gallery of Art and the National Archives and Records Administration.
Continue reading Remarks for the International Association of Paper Historians Congress
“Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost: Preservation in the Age of Shared Print and Withdrawal Projects” has been published in the November 2019 issue of C&RL: College and Research Libraries (Vol. 80, no. 7: https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.80.7.945)
The article — co-authored by Zachary Maiorana, Ian Bogus, Mary Miller, Katie Risseeuw, Jennifer Hain Teper, and myself — reviews current issues in shared print retention in relation to the library preservation mission. The collective effort led to some interesting materials in the literature review, and I think the discussion and conclusions provide some valuable calls to action.
The article is available online from C&RL in HTML or PDF format under the CC 4.0 license.
The Library of Congress provides a regular update to the Preservation Administrators Interest Group (PAIG), part of the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services of the American Library Association.
This page gathers the slide decks from my presentations in a PDF version, and is updated for each meeting. Additional details on the Library’s activities are provided in a regular series of updates to ALA, available here.
Dumbarton Oaks, Library of Congress, and National Museum of the American Indian convened a symposium called “Mesoamerican Codices: New Discoveries and New Directions.” This meeting of the Pre-Columbian Studies Colloquium was organized by Diana Magaloni Kerpel and Barbara E. Mundy.
Betsy Haude, from the Library’s Conservation Division, and Tana Villafana, from the Research and Testing Division were invited to present their work on two significant codices and I was honored to provide some opening remarks for the sessions at the Library:
Continue reading Remarks for Mesoamerican Codices: New Discoveries and New Directions
I taught immersion sessions for the NDSR Art program in 2017 and 2018. These sessions have acquired the title of “Think Like a Computer,” which comes from a series of talks and lectures I’ve done for librarians to introduce basic computing concepts and teach preservation of digital objects just the same way I might explain preservation of books and papers. We start with how the things are made and how they operate and that gives us the basis for making informed decisions about how to perpetuate access to them, and to respect the particular affordances that make them what they are.
Slides from these talks are available at this Google drive link (though I may replace this version in a few weeks based on questions and feedback).
For Preservation Week 2018, the Preservation Directorate and the Veterans History Project presented a program on the work we do to collect and care for the history of people who served in the American armed forces. A video of the event is available as part of our Topics in Preservation series and my opening remarks follow:
Continue reading Remarks on Preservation Week and the Veterans History Project
The Library of Congress and ReCAP received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a project to evaluate the condition of bibliographically identical materials from partner libraries across different regions of the United States. The “Assessing the National Collections” project will provide rigorous scientific data on the characteristics of these materials, using test methods developed in the Library’s Preservation Research and Testing Division. Outcomes of the project will support decision-making for national cooperative print archive efforts, and an advisory body has convened to guide the program and help to connect its research outcomes to professional issues. My remarks for the opening meeting follow:
Continue reading Remarks for Assessing the National Collection Inaugural Meeting