2013 Annual Meeting Information

The Preservation Section Business Meeting and Program took place on Friday August 16 12:30pm - 2:30pm

At the meeting, the Steering Committee wanted to acknowledge the death of valued colleague and friend of Preservation, Jane Long. Elizabeth Joffrion, Member-at-Large, said the following: "For those of you who didn’t know her, Jane was a long time champion of emergency preparedness and response in her longtime role at Heritage Preservation and most recently at the National Archives.   Jane passed away in Arlington, VA on July 25th from cancer.  I knew Jane primarily through my former role at the National Endowment for the Humanities.   She was the project director on several NEH grants, including the Alliance for Response and on the Field Guide to Readiness and Response, among others.  Over the years, we all came to value her perspective as a professional, a peer reviewer, an applicant, and a friend.  I've been asked to read a tribute from her friend and our Section’s outgoing Chair, Aimee Primeaux, who was not able to attend this meeting.   

'I first met Jane in 2005 when I worked at NEDCC. I got to know her through her work with the Heritage Health Index, the Emergency Response and Salvage Wheel, and the (now infamous) Katrina conference calls that Heritage Preservation hosted. She became a personal friend in 2011 when we were both hired by the National Archives as Preservation Program Officers. We started on the same day and had two sides of the same job:  she focused on the "outward facing" records emergency work (such as working with FEMA), while I focused on the "inward facing" work of managing the records emergency programs for all NARA facilities. We worked together closely, visiting each other's desks multiple times a day to try to figure out the seemingly endless bureaucracy of our first federal positions. We ate lunch together and strategized about our projects. We shared the same love of office supplies.

Jane had many talents, but her real talent was in preservation outreach. She knew instantly whether an outreach strategy would work, and when looking at an image whether it would "read," and her public presentations always made me laugh. She understood the importance of packaging our message so that our audience will receive it and understand it. This is evidenced in the Wheel and the Field Guide. Marketing ourselves has not historically been a strength of preservation, but I'm hopeful that all of us can take a lesson from Jane's lead and look at new and interesting ways we can reach our audiences and communicate our message. Jane would expect nothing less. '

For those of you wishing to honor Jane and her work at Heritage Preservation, her husband Richard Long and family have established the Jane S. Long Memorial Fund for Emergency Programs.  Contributions will be used to fund Heritage Preservation’s emergency preparedness and response initiatives, which Jane so passionately supported for many years. You may do this by accessing the fund through a link on the HP site."    

Following the business portion of the meeting, the Section hosted a panel on Preservation in the Cloud, an examination of what “digital preservation” means in a cloud computing environment. This panel discussion will ask hard questions about the difference between “storage” and “preservation” when it comes to the cloud and consider real-life implementation and planning that goes into working in the cloud. Speakers included Dennis Meissner from the Minnesota Historical Society, Mark Evans from Tessella’s Preservica, and Kelli Bogan from Colby-Sawyer College.

Preservation Section Business Meeting Remarks can be found here. 

Presentations: 

Collaboration to Preserve Our Digital Heritage: an Update to the IMLS Connecting to Collections Initiative

Tom Clareson, Lyrasis

Gina Minks, Amigos

Colby-Sawyer College: A Case Study in Digital Preeservation

Kelli Bogan, Colby-Sawyer College

Digital Preservation in the Cloud

Mark Evans, Preservica 

Minnesota Historical Society Report on Digital Preservation and Cloud Services

Dennis Meissner, Minnesota Historical Society

Link to the Full Report