Month: July 2014

Getting involved in PARS

As ALA Annual Vegas recedes into a hazy memory, and with a fresh round of Committee assignments starting and new guidance from PARS-Exec about expectations for Interest Group and Conference participation, I’ve had a few questions from people about how to get involved in PARS.

First off, let me say thank you, bravo, and encore. We need new people to take up the work of the Association, because some of us are more than ready for a little break, plus you seem to have energy, ambition, and good ideas. If you’re wavering, wondering what you might be signing on for, and what you’ll get out of it, let me give it to you plainly:

  • PARS is a friendly group of people.
  • PARS is a small Section of ALA, so we often have room for people who want to get involved.
  • PARS gets a pretty high amount of stuff done, pretty quickly.
  • PARS develops and promotes standards and practices that see actual use.
  • PARS does not get everything done, nor does it do everything quickly.
  • PARS pulls off some big things, Preservation Week, for example.
  • PARS knows more about inherent vice than any other Section of ALA.

Now let me make that all a little murky.

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FRBR Group 1 as a Preservation Administration Framework

I gave a talk on using FRBR group 1 entities as a framework for preservation administration at the FRBR Interest Group during the ALA Annual 2014 conference [Las Vegas, NV; Friday, June 2; 10:30 am PT]. This talk proposed a way of using FRBR to coordinate preservation effort across library networks and to clarify the goals and expected outcomes of preservation and conservation efforts. Special attention was paid to two areas where frameworks for this kind of coordination are urgently needed: managing regional print archives and understanding the role of digitization in preservation management. The slides (download ppsx) and transcript (below) should give a good sense of how this works, and an article that expands on this talk is on its way to Library Resources and Technical Services for review.

The majority of this talk focuses on aligning FRBR group 1 entities with areas of preservation administration, but there are brief remarks on two other frameworks that I’m working on: evaluating scarcity in print collections and describing the focal points for preservation interventions on information carriers. (There’s some clunky language in that last clause, I know. I find these frameworks useful, but I’m still a long way from being able to convey them with any elegance.) These models support the particular use-cases I discussed  in the talk, print archives and reformatting, but they are concepts I have found useful in many other areas, and I use them both in teaching preservation and evaluating preservation strategies.

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