Library receives grants to develop preservation training programs

Cornell University Library (CUL) has received two grants to develop training programs for librarians and archivists around the world.

·The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded CUL's Preservation Department and the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections a $230,167 grant to develop an innovative new digital preservation training program. The program will be offered through an online tutorial and a one-week, on-site workshop.

The goal of digital preservation is to maintain the ability to display, retrieve and use digital material in the face of rapidly changing technological and organizational infrastructures. Unfortunately, there is no single best way to do that, nor is there agreement on long-term solutions. Even in the short-term, librarians and archivists must understand their own institutional requirements before they can begin to identify the combination of policies, strategies, and tactics that is likely to be most effective in meeting their needs. The primary goal of CUL's new training program is to enable effective decision making for administrators who will be responsible for the longevity of digital objects in an age of technological uncertainty.

The online tutorial will be a prerequisite for workshop participants, but also will be freely available as a stand-alone tool. The workshops, to be held at Cornell, will cover program planning; management and evaluation; risk assessment and management; cost benefit analysis; legal issues; the role of file formats, standards and metadata; storage and maintenance; disaster planning; the relationship between preservation and access; preservation strategies, approaches, and methodologies; technology forecasting for preservation. The beta version of the online tutorial will be available online in spring 2003 and the first workshop will be held in July 2003. The library plans to offer two workshops in 2003 and three in 2004. For more information, go to http://www.library.cornell.edu/iris/research/workshop.html.

·The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has contracted with CUL's Department of Preservation and Collection Maintenance to write and design an online tutorial for librarians and archivists in Southeast Asia about the preservation of library and archival materials. Funded by a major grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to CLIR, this is a one-year project designed to produce a tutorial that can be adapted in future years to address the needs of various other regions of the world.

The preservation tutorial will provide a comprehensive source of information, covering all aspects of library preservation. It also will be prescriptive, offering practical answers to a wide variety of questions. While describing the ideal way to respond to problems, it will identify approaches that are attainable for every library. The first online tutorial, which should be available in October 2002, is aimed specifically at Southeast Asia. Librarians in each of 10 nations have provided specific information on vendors in their countries, as well as translations for parts of the online glossary. Subsequent years' tutorials will focus on Latin America, Asia and Africa, provided that funding can be obtained.

For more information on either of these projects, contact John Dean, director of Cornell Library's Department of Preservation and Collection Maintenance, at 255-9440 or e-mail jfd5@cornell.edu.