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CHICAGO — The Preservation Administrators Interest Group (PAIG) hosts a program on the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Fellowships in Preservation Administration from 8 a.m. to noon on Saturday, June 23 in the Hyatt's Terrace Room.

The New York Public Library (NYPL) and its partner Yale University Library were awarded a grant from IMLS to host fellows from 2010-2012. The national leadership program aims to prepare future leaders in preservation. Fellows worked in all areas of preservation and completed a research project, as well as smaller projects that rotated to other departments for additional experiences in collections care. Experiences ranged from traditional book and paper in both general and special collections to more specialized experiences in audiovisual material and exhibition de-installation. Each fellowship was nine months.

The eight fellows are Martha Horan, Kevin O’Sullivan, Kimberly Peach, Annie Peterson, Nicholas Szydlowski, Kimberly Tarr, Jonah Volk and Emily Vinson.

The program was supervised by Roberta Pilette, director of preservation at Yale University Libraries, and by Evelyn Frangakis, Aaron and Clara Greenhut Rabinowitz, assistant director for preservation at the New York Public Library.

As part of the training fellows traveled to other institutions, with Yale fellows spending three days at NYPL, and NYPL Fellows spending two days at Yale, creating additional opportunities to meet preservation professionals, see a wider range of programs and to network with their fellow fellows. Many other institutions generously contributed to the training with site visits to preservation departments of Columbia University, Georgetown University, Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine, the National Archives and Records Administration, New York University, Rutgers University and University of Connecticut at Storrs. The fellowships included very generous stipends and travel monies to facilitate attendance and presenting at professional conferences.

In addition to their extensive training, fellows performed outreach through Preservation Week events and through fieldwork at other departments within the host institutions. Fellows participated in a range of administrative training opportunities from staff meetings, presentations to other staff and serving on the search committee for the next round of fellows.

Also on the PAIG Program:

Jacqueline Bronicki, associate librarian - IMLS project coordinator, University of Michigan, will report on the latest findings of their IMLS-funded research into large-scale digitization projects. Data will be presented on three full-scale production runs: more than 3,000 volumes from three different stratified samples and coded data from more than 300,000 digital pages.

A remembrance of Jan Merrill-Oldham, the Malloy-Rabinowitz preservation librarian at Harvard University, where she directed the Weissman Preservation Center in the Harvard University Library and the Preservation & Imaging Services Department in the Harvard College Library from November 1995 to February 2010.

The Institute for Museum and Library Services is a federal government grant-making agency. The mission of IMLS is to inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement. We provide leadership through research, policy development, and grant making.

The Yale University Library Preservation Department, started in 1971, is one of the oldest in the country. Responsible for the long-term care of the rich and unique record of human thought and creativity contained in the Yale University Library collections, it has strong administrative support and has played a major role in the development of the preservation field.

The New York Public Library has one of the oldest, largest, and most comprehensive institutional preservation programs in the United States, with activities dating back to the 1911 opening of the landmark Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The Barbara Goldsmith Preservation Division cares for the Library’s permanent assets in all formats housed in more than ninety-one buildings in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, as well as a high-density storage facility in New Jersey. The Division preserves both the artifacts that comprise the Library’s vast and diverse collections as well as their intellectual content.

PAIG is part of the Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS), a division of the 91´«Ã½.