Category: Classes and Workshops

The next installment of Fundamentals of Preservation runs May 16-June 10. You can contact me for more information through the comment form (nothing is posted publicly; it just sends me an email) or you learn more and register for the course at the ALCTS website.

I co-developed Fundamentals of Preservation with Karen Brown (SUNY Albany) as part of the ALCTS continuing education series. This course is part of the three-course series that makes up the Library Support Staff Certification ProgramCollection Management elective. Fundamentals of Preservation was recently mentioned in the American Libraries Winter Digital Supplement (Pages 11-12) on e-learning.

 

 

On May 11, I’ll be co-leading “Audio Archives 101: Identification, Organization, and Preservation,” the pre-conference workshop for ARSC 2011. The conference is in Los Angeles, downtown at the Westin Bonaventure. Audio archives are a fascinating part of the library, archive, and museum sector. As a preservation librarian, the media in these collections pose a lot of challenging problems.

Aaron Bittel (UCLA) and Karen Fishman (Library of Congress) deserve the lion’s share of credit for putting this workshop together. I’ll primarily be talking about assessment, but audio archives require a diverse set of expertise, and Aaron and Karen bring that in spades. I expect to learn just as much as I teach. There will be some lecture, plenty of time for discussion, but most importantly, a significant amount of hands-on examination of materials.

I co-developed Fundamentals of Preservation with Karen Brown (SUNY Albany) as part of the ALCTS continuing education series. This course is part of the three-course series that makes up the Library Support Staff Certification Program Collection Management elective. Fundamentals of Preservation was recently mentioned in the American Libraries Winter Digital Supplement (Pages 11-12) on e-learning.

You can contact me for more information through the comment form (nothing is posted publicly; it just sends me an email) or you learn more and register for the course at the ALCTS website. The next installment runs April 4-29, and the course is taught 3 or 4 times each year.

Here are the slides from “What To Do Before You Digitize, a Roadmap for Smaller Institutions.” You can download them in grayscale (best for black & white printers; 6.8MB PDF) or download in color (9.8MB PDF), and as a youtube video:

Some additional resources we discussed during the session:

• Peter Hirtle’s guide to copyright and the public domain in the United States.

On Wednesday, March 3, I’ll be at History San Jose to give a workshop on the basics of digital preservation. This workshop is being given as part of the California Association of Museums conference and is the public test-run for a new digital preservation curriculum that the California Preservation Program is developing.

For workshop attendees, here’s the handout (2.6 MB, PDF)

The goals of this workshop are to provide people with enough information to get started with digital projects and make good course corrections as they do so. By way of further provenance, I suspect that this has its genesis in some off-the-cuff remarks I made at the IMLS “Call to Action” forum in Buffalo, part of their Connecting to Collections project.

The uncontroversial assumptions at work in this workshop are that digital preservation consists largely of the creation of some digital content that is preservable, putting that content is in a reliable systems environment, and paying attention to emerging needs and problems. The subtext is that the digital side of our operations are mature enough that we should lower the barriers to entry and the criteria for successful digital preservation efforts.

This workshop tries to avoid the inertia that comes from pondering problems that won’t manifest themselves in the immediate future or with the implications that every institutions need to have a deep engagement with expert digital preservation efforts. By quarantining those disincentives and providing some good foundational guidance, I hope this series helps to give smaller institutions what they need to get started and be confident that their efforts will prove sustainable.