Preservation Week 2025: A Day in the Life, Monday

Preservation Week is here! This annual celebration, first sponsored by the American Library Association and the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services in 2010, was established to raise awareness of the role libraries and other cultural institutions play in providing preservation education and information. The theme for this year is Preserve the Past, Shape the Future: Inspiring the Next Generation.

All this week Preservation Underground will be bringing you snapshots of the different kinds of work that we do to support the collections and mission of Duke Libraries. Today we are engaged in probably our most important work: planning and prioritizing.

Each month our conservators meet with curatorial staff from the Rubenstein Library to assess collection material that has been identified for treatment and set priorities for our work. The materials that we care for come in a wide range of sizes, materials, geographic and cultural origins, and time periods. With millions of items in the collection and just a few of us in the lab, we are not able to work on everything. During these meetings, we consider the past and anticipated future use of these items (for research, instruction, exhibit, or digitization) and try to determine what treatments are most appropriate for them. Some items will receive extensive treatment, while others will just get minor stabilization or an enclosure.  Collaborating with the curators on treatment plans and priorities helps us to support the work of researchers and students who come in to use these materials. Good stewardship of Duke’s collections will allow them to be usable for generations of researchers to come.

Day 1: Curatorial meetings
Day 2: Presenting our HVAC pilot project
Day 3: Using UV light to analyze materials
Day 4: Discovering details in book bindings
Day 5: Field trip! Gathering damaged books from Circulation points