Happy Preservation Week!

April 23, 2018

Preservation is central to the mission of the IHS year round, but we celebrate it just a little bit more at the end of April every year. Preservation Week is an initiative of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, a division of the American Library Association, which encourages libraries and other institutions to connect with their communities through events and other resources to highlight things we can do, both individually and together, to preserve our personal and shared collections.  Visit the Preservation Week website for preservation tips and to watch this year’s free webinars – one on preserving your family recipes and one about community archiving efforts to preserve the stories of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Here at IHS, we kick off the annual celebration with Preservation Week Road Show, an event that gives the public a chance to speak with local appraisers and conservators about their family heirlooms and learn more about how to preserve them for future generations. This past Saturday we welcomed more than 150 people to the History Center for our 5th annual Road Show. In addition to one-on-one consultations, guests were able to attend informational sessions about preserving textiles, identifying photographs, and connecting family narratives to family heirlooms. They were also able to have their photos and paper documents scanned by our digitization expert. Stay tuned for information about the 2019 Preservation Week Road Show – it’s always a fun event and we hope to see you next year!

In order to keep the Preservation Week celebration going, there will be a series of blog posts featuring the work we do year-round to care for our collections. We hope you’ll check back every day this week as IHS conservation staff and interns discuss some of the tools and techniques we use here in the conservation lab to preserve Indiana’s history and make it accessible to all of you.

Stephanie Gowler is the paper conservator at IHS. She's always dreaming about and planning for her next meal, her next quilting project, and her next travel adventure.

Share this post:

<Previous Blog Post Pondering the Impact of History Museums

>Next Blog Post Surveying the Bretzman Glass Plate Negatives

Facebook Comment