Preservation Publication Award: Margaret Crockett and Emilie Gagnet Leumas

Margaret Crockett, consultant archivist and records manager and director of The Archive-Skills Consultancy, and Emilie Gagnet Leumas, archives and records management consultant with EGL Consultants, LLC, have been awarded the 2025 Preservation Publication Award from the Society of American Archivists (SAA) for their book, Emergency Management and Disaster Preparedness: A Manual for Protecting Archives (International Council on Archives, 2024). The award recognizes the author(s) or editor(s) of an outstanding published work related to archives preservation.

Emergency Management and Disaster Preparedness is a comprehensive guide to preventing, preparing for, managing, and recovering from disasters that threaten archives. As a freely available PDF with a hyper-linked table of contents and an extensive index, the manual is easy to navigate and features usable forms and checklists to support readers in creating their own disaster plans. Drawing from their professional experience of working and teaching in the field of disaster planning and protecting archives, the authors also included unique and innovative materials such as a portion of one author's disaster journal, which illustrates ways of processing trauma, and a related appendix that demonstrates how such journals can be adapted to create powerful reports on the course and results of a disaster.

The SAA Awards Committee commends the authors for their accessible and understandable work. One committee member noted, “This book is very comprehensive and practical for everyone, from small volunteer organizations to large cultural heritage institutions.” Another added, “The disaster journal excerpts in the book were very helpful to understand the response and recovery process. I hope that others will be influenced to do the same.”

This award was established by SAA in 1993. Previous recipients include Monique Lassere and Jess Whyte for their article "Balancing Care and Authenticity in Digital Collections: A Radical Empathy Approach To Working With Disk Images."