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C&RL News March 2011  180

Jane Hedberg is senior preservation program officer 
at Harvard University Library, e-mail: jane_hedberg@
harvard.edu; fax: (617) 496-8344

Guide to digitization
Preparing Collections for Digitization is a 
how-to-manual that places digitization in the 
context of collection management. Written 
by Anna E. Bülow, head of preservation, 
and Jess Ahmon, preservation officer, at 
The National Archives (UK), the 184-page 
handbook describes the practical preser-
vation issues involved in digitizing library 
and archives collections. It covers what to 
consider before you digitize; understand-
ing the basic concepts, specifications, and 
standards for digital images; selecting items 
and collections; surveying collections; equip-
ping an image capture operation; preparing 
documents for safe imaging; treating dam-
aged documents; and setting up an imaging 
operation.

The book is available for £40.46 from 
the National Archives Bookstore at www.
nationalarchives.gov.uk/bookshop/details.
aspx?titleId=1421 or for approximately $100 
from U.S. vendors. ISBN: 9781856047111.

WESTPAS workshops
The Western States and Territories Preser-
vation Assistance Service (WESTPAS) will 
offer 31 free workshops in 2011–12 thanks 
to an NEH grant award. The workshops will 
cover writing and testing plans for disaster 
response and collection salvage. They will 
be offered to 600 staff members from 300 
small libraries and archives in the 14 West-
ern and Pacific states and territories that 
WESTPAS serves. 

For those in other states, the WESTPAS 
Web site has a free taped version of the ear-
lier two-day workshop, “Protecting Library 
and Archive Collections: Disaster Prepared-
ness, Response and Recovery,” given in 
Richmond, California, in 2009.

For more information and the schedule 
of upcoming workshops, go to westpas.org 
/courses.html.

LC video presentations
The Library of Congress (LC) has two new titles 
in its online collection of digital preservation 
videos. “Archiving Digital Audio” with Peter 
Alyea runs just over 15 minutes and contains 
practical advice about preserving personal audio 
collections. 

“Preserving Personal Web Content” with 
Abigail Grotke and Gina Jones runs just over 
eight minutes and offers practical tips for or-
ganizing and preserving personal Web sites, 
blogs, social networking information, music, 
etc. Both presentations were recorded May 
10, 2010, during LC’s Personal Archiving Day.

The URL for all LC’s video presentations 
is www.digitalpreservation.gov/videos/index.
html.

Digitizing home movies
The Center for Home Movies held the “Home 
Movie Digitization and Access Summit” at the 
National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in 
Culpeper, Virginia, September 22-24, 2010. The 
Summit considered the technical and legal issues 
involved in digitizing amateur film and video, 
the role of cataloging and description in pro-
viding access to it, and the impact significantly 
increased online access to home movies would 
have on home movie makers, families, research-
ers, documentary filmmakers, and the public. 
More than 40 invited participants discussed what 
would be needed to undertake such a mass 
digitization project. A 126-page final report, 
published in January 2011, includes background 
documents, texts of the presentations, and sum-
maries of the discussions.

The final report is available as a free 
PDF at www.homemoviesummit.org/docs 
/Home_Movie_Summit_Final_Report.pdf. 
For more information about the summit, 
contact Dwight Swanson at swanson@cen-
terforhomemovies.org. 

P r e s e r v a t i o n  N e w sJane Hedberg