Category: Conference Presentations

I’ll be speaking on November 16 at Digital Asset Management Los Angeles 2010. I’m going to talk about the way the cultural heritage sector evaluates systems, focusing on our inevitable need to make a transition between technological platforms. I think this can create a dynamic where vendors are trying to sell best of breed technology, but our need for reliable ingest and export of our assets (metadata especially) trumps all. In those cases, both groups lose out. We end up with subpar systems, and developers lose the opportunity to work with our sector. And as I’ve said many times, the library, archive and museum sector has cool people and interesting stuff in abundance.

On September 9 (11:00 am, Pacific Daylight Time , GMT-07:00), I gave a presentation about the preservation review methods that are in development at UCLA Library as part of an OCLC Research Webinar, entitled “Managing Collections in the Networked Environment: New Analytic Approaches.”

Constance Malpas hosted this panel, which featured Helen Look (University of Michigan), Zack Lane (Columbia/ReCAP), and I presenting some of our work on data-driven approaches to library decision-making. Based on the planning calls and the materials we’ve shared, and the broad group of attendees, I think the program had something of value for people in every branch of library science.

Helen and Zack have access to some fantastic system-wide data about print and digital versions of the so-called “collective collection” and are showing interesting patterns in their work. I’m picking up the litter from that perspective to talk about how to deal with severely decayed materials in a way that  protects scarce resources and locally important materials while also pushing the library network to provide the resilience for less threatened materials and to soak up some of the costs of this work.

You can get information about the archived webinar, available on-line and through iTunes U from OCLC’s site: http://www.oclc.org/research/events/webinars.htm

My slides and some rough speaker notes are available in This PDF file, and I’ll post follow-up and further materials at this address (jacobnadal.com/107) after the webinar.

Here’s a quicktime movie of the slides from the presentation for the Preservation Administration Discussion Group at ALA Annual 2010, in Washington, D.C. Click the space bar to advance through the quicktime slides, or watch the whole thing drift by on youtube, below:

I will be giving two presentations at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC.

On June 25, I’ll be giving a presentation at the Preservation Administration Interest Group. PAIG meets from 1-5 in the Mayflower Renaissance, Colonial Ballroom. I’m on the agenda for around 3:30. The talk is “From Survey to Audit,” on the work we’re doing at UCLA to do surveys and audits of our collections. The hooks are that 1) we have a common conceptual model for these efforts that let us harmonize preservation data collection and 2) we have some tools and techniques for making surveys fast and reliable.

On June 26, I’ll be giving a short program on “What To Do Before You Digitize, a Roadmap for Smaller Institutions” from 4:00 – 5:30 at the Washington Convention Center, room 202A. This session will cover the issues to consider before you digitize so you can successfully plan, implement, and maintain a digital collection. We’ll focus on basic concepts of digital project planning and digital preservation to make sure that your digital collections are safely stored, properly formatted, and accompanied with useful metadata so that when changes come, your collections will be ready for them.

On May 14, the California Preservation Program (CPP) and the Library Binding Institute (LBI) held a workshop on library binding at the Arcadia Public Library, in Arcadia, CA. I attended to speak briefly about preservation and work with people during the afternoon hands-on session.

Commercial binding is the gateway service to other preservation and conservation services in libraries. I had a great time talking with the attendees about the needs they see at their institutions and some first steps they might try to address their concerns.

This workshop was part of the debut of the excellent new Library Binding Toolkit, a useful new resource which we were able to give to each attendee gratis, thanks to the support of CPP and LBI.

Before and after the workshop, the 37 participants were asked to score their confidence in the following areas (on a four-point scale), and I think the numbers speak for the themselves.

	Before Workshop	After	Difference	% increase
Identify types of pre-commercially bound leaf attachments?	65	129	64	98%
Identify various types of binding commercial binding options?	68	141	73	107%
Prepare items for commercial binding?	78	141	63	81%
Review commercial bound material for quality?	80	147	67	84%
Communicate effectively with commercial binder’s customer service representative?	80	138	58	73%