More Preservation resources

Last month’s blog posts for Preservation Week were interesting and inspiring. Building on this theme, here are some resources to expand your knowledge base in both print and digital preservation. I believe that our members are our best resources. Tell us what you’re doing! How do you gain expertise and provide training in your organizations? As a LIPA board member I am particularly interested in knowing about projects that might be used as models for broader LIPA member collaboration.

Northeast Document Conservation Center  Founded way back in 1973 as a conservation lab specializing in preservation and conservation of print-based collections, and now also include imaging services, audio preservation and more.  Check out the array of free resources available including webinars, workshops, leaflets, readings, course materials and Ask NEDCC service.

Lyrasis is another source of information and training in preservation. Low cost (and a few free) webinars cover topics from oral history preservation, to metadata for digitization and preservation. The Lyrasis Digitization Collaborative is worth exploring, and I see that Thurgood Marshall Law Library is listed as a participant.

You may also look for programs from your nearby Universities that are willing to conduct special sessions and collaborate with you on unique projects.  For instance Duke University’s Conservation Services publishes Preservation Underground blog with helpful tricks and techniques and their staff does onsite training at our law library annually.

Do you have rare treasures? American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works  has an online directory for finding a conservator by specialty and geographic location and information on how to choose a conservator. The website also provides links to publications and workshops.

Melanie Dunshee

Personal Digital Archiving Resources

Recently I had an opportunity to attend the Personal Digital Archiving 2014 conference co-sponsored by the Library of Congress, the Indiana State Library and Indiana State University Library, in collaboration with the Coalition for Networked Information. The PDA conference has been held annually since 2010, initially sponsored by the Internet Archive but now carried forward as a grassroots effort by a number of other institutions.

I attended the conference to learn more about issues in personal archiving, and in particular I hoped to find some inspiration for organizing and preserving my own documents and family photographs. The 2-day conference gave me a much better grounding in the theoretical aspects of personal digital archiving and the research being done to document archiving practices.

I was intrigued by keynote speaker Andrea Copeland’s dream of co-created community repositories housed in public libraries as a means of personal digital preservation. I related to the statement by one conference participant that people take so many more photos now (because of smart phones and tablet technology) that they value each one less. I appreciated Pekka Uotila’s description of his attempt to create a family archive and his conclusion that the archiving process is a never ending epic story. And I was challenged by Nick Krabbenhoeft to think about social media, text messages and wearable technology as life logs. (Hmm, yes, my Fitbit® is a form a personal digital archiving!)

If any of these ideas pique your curiosity to learn more about personal archiving, see Mike Ashenfelder’s report on PDA2014 for additional speakers and topics.

Although I did not come away with a step-by-step guide to preserving those family photos, I do know that there are resources out there that can help me get started. The Library of Congress has been a leader in promoting personal digital archiving, so for more information see this great site on preserving your own digital memories: digital photographs, audio and video; electronic mail; personal digital records; and websites. This is a great place to start for basic guidance on preserving personal and family memories.

The Signal is the Library of Congress blog on digital preservation, which is recommended reading for anyone interested in preservation generally. It includes a series of posts on personal archiving. There is also a new Facebook page for Personal and Community Digital Archiving.

The theme of Preservation Week is Pass It On. Whether you are preserving our legal and cultural heritage in your library or your personal family history at home, share this week’s stories and resources with others for the benefit of future generations.

Pass It On!

Margaret K. Maes Executive Director Legal Information Preservation Alliance

#LibraryofCongress #personaldigitalarchiving #PreservationWeek

Expanding the Past: Indiana’s Digital Collection of Historic Documents

Like many academic law libraries, the Indiana University Maurer School of Law Library began loading digital content into an Institutional Repository over the last few years.  In our case it was into a Digital Commons (BePress) site.  Our main goal in establishing the site was to collect, preserve, and disseminate the intellectual output of our law school.  Not surprisingly our initial projects centered upon faculty writings and student edited journals.  By the end of the repository’s second year of existence we had loaded more than 750 articles by faculty members and the complete back run of our five student edited journals, resulting in more than 650,000 downloads. (A complete report on the repository’s first two years can be found here.)

Having created procedures which result in quickly loading current “intellectual output” into the repository, we then began thinking about what sort of older output we could load.  As a result, this year we have expanded the repository to include a variety of historic documents related to the law school.  These materials have been grouped under the heading Law School History and Archives Collection and include the subcategories of: Awards, Commencement Activities, Historic Documents, Law School Building, Law School Dean Portraits, and Law School Deans.

Each category contains links to digitized documents, the originals of which are found in the Law Library’s Archives collection.  In addition to making these documents available online for the first time, the process has provided us with an opportunity to improve the organization and conservation of the original materials.  As each item goes through the digitization process, we clean the item, remove old staples, repair any damage to it that is repairable, and insure that the item is being stored in an appropriate conservation quality container.  At the same time we consider whether the item needs to be transferred to a more appropriate location in our collection or if changes or additions are needed in its cataloging.

It is a little early to determine if the documents will be viewed by large numbers of researchers, but we are confident that loading them into the repository will insure that they will be viewed by more researchers than if we had not loaded them, while the originals are in better shape than they were before the project started and will be handled less – all insuring these important documents will live a longer life.

Here are a couple of my favorites from the Law School History and Archives Collection:

1. Hundred Days Volunteer Certificate:  a certificate of gratitude issued to an Indiana soldier who served in the 134th Regiment of the Indiana Infantry during the Civil War.  The document has the signature of Abraham Lincoln on it, but we have surmised that the signature is a facsimile.

2. When the Lawyers Rode the Circuit: An 1895 article by our first Dean, David Banta, describing the pioneer lawyers of early Indiana.

3. The Constitution of the United States at the End of One Hundred Fifty Years:This little known pamphlet was published by the University in 1939 as the first in a series of social science publications.  It was written by faculty member Hugh Willis.

4. Hugh Willis and his Golf Clubs (photograph):  Willis was a law school faculty member and Acting Dean (1942-43), but also served as the University golf coach for five years.

5. Indiana Law Club: Meeting Minutes, 9/26/1934-10/15/1940 Meeting minutes of the Indiana Law Club (affiliate of the Indiana State Bar Association) from September 26, 1934 to October 15, 1940. Handwritten notes of meetings, with some typed notes pasted in chronologically.

Richard Vaughan Acquisitions & Serials Control Librarian Indiana University Maurer School of Law

#DigitalCommons #IndianaUniversity #lawschoolarchives #PreservationWeek