Looking Forward to Preservation Week 2022 and LIA

Last year LIPA highlighted a number of preservation webinars to help celebrate and facilitate preservation within your communities. At the most recent LIPA Board meeting, we took time to discuss our intention to host a one-day virtual event during 2022 Preservation Week (April 24 - 30). Although ALA has yet to announce its 2022 theme, we considered a number of topics to discuss during our virtual event including trends in law libraries’ preservation goals and the awareness that libraries and the individuals working within them perform best when everyone works together, regardless of job function.

Collaboration is essential to one of the projects I am working on now: to collect the James E. Rogers College of Law born-digital media files and bring them under the Cracchiolo Law Library umbrella for both preservation and access. This project includes working with the Roger’s College Information Technology Department with support from both my immediate supervisor and my library director.

When born-digital media was first produced at the Rogers College, it was captured and managed by the college’s IT Department using the video platform Mediasite. Then a need for migration came and material was transferred to Panopto. Following the transfer, born-digital media has lived in Panopto since. Today, the majority of the born-digital media produced by the college is being captured via Zoom and uploaded to YouTube. With an access assist from IT, I have collected the digital material that is living on Panopto and now the YouTube material awaits.

To actively preserve the digital media discussed above and provide access to it, my law library is strongly considering joining the Legal Information Archive. At its core, this consortium of like minded law libraries is interested in preserving “print and electronic legal material.” However, given the continuously evolving application that is Preservica, consortium members are also actively preserving and providing access to “institutional content, born-digital material, and much more.”

There are currently two LIA subscription options for the year 2022. An institutional level subscription includes full involvement in LIA, including a designated collection for your library and participation in the project’s steering meetings, with a $1,500 annual fee. The collection level subscription includes up to 1 GB of content per collection (additional data or discrete collections can be purchased) which is ingested by LIPA and housed in LIPA’s general collection at a one-time price of $2,000. For additional information or to request a demo, contact Michelle Trumbo at lipa.trumbo@gmail.com.

Use Google Slides to Exhibit Archival Material

The archival material in your collections can deliver wonder visually. If you work with archives and special collections, exhibition is one of the best ways for you to market and provide access to those items. If exhibition isn’t something you are doing in your law library, let us know what’s keeping you from doing so in the comments. Perhaps you are a lone arranger and don’t have the time. Maybe you lack the required tools. Or maybe you are limiting yourself to the idea that an exhibit must be a physical one.

Physical exhibition had long been a primary promotional tool for Archives and Special Collections at the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library. The move to remote work last year provided the Law Library the opportunity to market its archival material via online exhibits. Several exhibit cases were used to rotate material on exhibit or rotate exhibits entirely. Still, online engagement with the community was lacking as far as exhibition. Enter Google Slides.

To spotlight your archival holdings, facilitate collaboration, enhance visual appeal, and publish to the web, Google Slides is a good tool. Last year, the Cracchiolo Law Library created two on-line exhibits using Google Slides: Ruth Bader Ginsburg: In Her Words and Rising from the Red. The first exhibit, In Her Words, was created by Law Library Fellow Alex Clay Hutchings (with Collections Management Librarian Jessica Ugstad) and their work inspired the second, Rising from the Red, which I created.

One way I chose to enhance my presentation and spotlight one of the Law Library’s archival objects was to use images as slide backgrounds. This allowed me to exhibit a physical object and the inscription found inside virtually (see slide 23 of Rising from the Red for an example).

There are various tutorials available online to learn how to create and enhance a Google Slides presentation. “Getting started with Google Slides” and “Add or change animations and transitions” are a good place to start. Additionally, a search of the phrase “how to create a google slide presentation” via YouTube will provide a number of useful results. Have any of you used Google Slides to exhibit your archival holdings? Did you enhance your presentation in any way? Let us know in the comments.

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LIPA intends to further its outreach efforts this year and as a new Member-at-Large on the Board, I am here to help assist with that effort. My name is Jaime Valenzuela and I am an archivist at the Cracchiolo Law Library. In particular, we at LIPA are interested in establishing a greater connection with LIPA points of contact. If you are that point of contact, feel free to reach out to me or Michelle Trumbo, LIPA’s Executive Director, directly. If you are looking to get more involved with LIPA or to see what we have been up to, please join us at our Annual Membership Meeting on Wednesday, July 28, from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm ET. For those unable to attend, please feel free to reach us via the LIPA Contact Page.

Preservation Week is Coming! April 25 - May 1, 2021

Next week is the American Library Association's Preservation Week. This year's theme is "Preserving Community Archives". Community archives are those organized by members of those communities (whether physical or self-identified), which empower the community members to document and interpret their experiences.

To celebrate and facilitate preservation within your communities, consider attending these preservation webinars:

Preservation Meets Public Health: Enduring Lessons from Pandemic Planning

Topics in Preservation Lecture Series from the Library of Congress

Presenter: Jacob Nadal, Director for Preservation

Monday April 26, 2021 at 11 a.m. (Eastern)

Register Here

This presentation will explain how the Library of Congress staff used information from the REALM project in conjunction with public health guidance to develop safe operations plans for activities that involved the Library’s collections. Jake will unpack the decision-making processes that staff used to allow the agency to operate safely, adapt to developments in the pandemic, and incorporate lessons-learned to improve future operating plans. These include adjustments to collections management processes and hybrid on-site/telework operations for conservation, scientific research, and preservation services.

Collecting and Preserving after Tragedy Presenter: Whitney Broadaway Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 2:00 - 3:00pm (Eastern)

Register Here

Following the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, FL, the Orange County Regional History Center launched an extensive rapid response collecting initiative to preserve the history of the tragic event and the community’s response. The Collections Manager, Whitney Broadaway, will share how the museum collected at memorial sites and inside the club, especially concerning the stabilization and preservation of items that underwent heavy exposure to the elements. Serving as an introductory to rapid response collecting, this webinar will discuss how the care of the collected items after the Pulse Nightclub shooting continued behind the scenes and is ongoing still today.

Introduction to Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) Presenter: Marie Lascu Wednesday, April 28, 2021 at 2:00 - 3:00pm (Eastern)

Register Here

The Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) model has always been intended to engage both trained professionals and anyone with home movies or other creative works stored on film, video, audio, or digital media objects. This webinar will give an overview of the history of the CAW committee, explain the basic workshop model, and summarize current work through grant-funded projects which are building heavily on the original workshop model and pushing it forward to focus on long-term preservation planning assistance and tools.

U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Digitization Tutorial: Stitching Files for Oversized Materials

Presenter: Rachael Johns

Click here for session recording

Have you ever needed to scan something that is too big to scan all at once? Creating files for oversized items can be challenging. In Preservation Services, we often digitize oversized library materials, such as foldouts from books or really big maps. If you also work with oversized materials, or just want to play with Adobe Photoshop with library people, please join us for a tutorial on stitching oversized materials. It covers basics and our work together to combine several files to represent an example oversized item.

Test Your Knowledge: Disaster Planning and Response

Presenter: Shelby Strommer

Click here for session recording

How much do you know about disaster planning and emergency response? Whether you want to brush up on the basics or show off your expertise, join us for this interactive game. This session will cover the library’s work before, during, and after a disaster. Viewers will understand the importance of disaster planning, gain practical knowledge for responding to disasters, and learn collections salvage basics.