Happy Preservation Week!

It’s Preservation Week (May 9-15) and the Preservation Department is celebrating by hosting a brown bag film festival for library staff. We’ve tried to make this entertaining and informative, so we’ve mixed up the films and video clips to keep everyone engaged. The kick off film will be The Restoration of Books, Florence 1966 since the salvage work brought together many of the American conservators who began to brainstorm the philosophical approach to collections care and formal library and archives conservation training. The vision of what became the Preservation and Conservation Studies program at Columbia University that later moved to the University of Texas, took root at this time.

Saving the National Treasures: NOVA and other well made videos from the New York Public Library (Behind the Scenes and Military Insignia), CCAHA’s muster roll project, the British Library’s newspaper project and NASA’s contribution to the conservation of the Charters of Freedom will also be shown to give everyone a taste of the problems that preservation faces both in analog and digital, the science behind the work, and the work itself. Three salvage videos from Heritage Preservation’s Field Guide to Emergency Response will be the only formal training videos included, and they will be spread out across the days since they are pretty dense with information.

On the last day, we keep things light with shorter clips including Mr. Bean at the Library, How to Preserve Comic Books, Team Digital Preservation, an oldie Murder in the Stacks (we all make fun of it, but the information still holds true), and we’ll close with Red Rot Cocktail from the Boston Athenaeum.

We had hoped to show the History Channel’s video The Star-Spangled Banner: Saving the Flag documenting the conservation treatment of the American flag at the Smithsonian, but it could not be tracked down. Even the History Channel store had no idea.

For those of you who cannot join us, many of the links to videos have been embedded for your viewing pleasure. If this isn’t enough, there are free preservation webinars offered this week through ALCTS covering identification of archival supplies and vendors (Tuesday), and mold prevention (Thursday). The Disaster Preparedness webinar series begins Wednesday for a fee.