Advancing Preservation for Archives and Manuscripts

Divided into three parts, the book covers preservation frameworks, the nuts and bolts of implementing and managing a preservation program, and the ethical and moral implications of preservation practices. Holding both the history of archival preservation and the current digital preservation landscape in mind, Elizabeth Joffrion and Michèle V. Cloonan have developed holistic principles and context for archival preservation that incorporate analog and digital approaches. They consider how "More Product, Less Process" can inform preservation strategies, examine sustainable practices that are sensitive to the impact of human activity on the environment, offer effective programmatic approaches to risk management, advocate for inclusive and community-focused preservation, and highlight the similarities and differences in preservation practices among libraries, archives, and museums.

Whether you're new to the profession or experienced in preservation management, you will find a valuable framework for thinking about how preservation is practiced today and how it may be carried out in the future to steward your collections and serve your communities. Readers will also discover that Advancing Preservation for Archives and Manuscripts complements and augments Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler's classic manual, Preserving Archives and Manuscripts.

Elizabeth Joffrion is the director of Heritage Resources and associate professor at Western Washington University where she leads the Libraries' Special Collections, University Archives and Record Center, and the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies. Prior to this position, she was a senior program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Preservation and Access where she coordinated the Preservation Assistance
Grants Program. She has held professional positions at the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery, the North Carolina State Archives and the Historic New Orleans Collection, and has also taught courses on archives and special collections at Catholic University and Western Washington University. She received an MA in history from the University of New Orleans and a MLIS from the University of Maryland.

Michèle Valerie Cloonan is a professor in the School of Library and Information Science, College of Organizational, Computational, and Information Sciences, and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University. She studied humanities at Bennington College (AB) and the University of Chicago (AM) and has an MS and a PhD in library and information science from the University of Illinois. She was a conservator at the Newberry Library, a preservation administrator at Brown University libraries, and a rare book curator at Smith College. At UCLA she was associate professor and chair of Information Studies. In 2010, she was awarded the Paul Banks-Carolyn Harris Preservation Award from the American Library Association. Her book, Preserving Our Heritage: Perspectives from Antiquity to the Digital Age (ALA/Neal Schuman), received the 2016 Society of American Archivists' Preservation Publication Award. In 2018, she published The Monumental Challenge of Preservation: The Past in a Volatile World (MIT Press), winner of the University of Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation Book Prize. More recently, a case study book that she coauthored with Peter Botticelli, Martha Mahard, and Simmons students, Libraries, Archives, and Museums Today: Insights from the Field, was published by Rowman & Littlefield.