ALCTS President's Program presents Dr. Linda Mehr, librarian to the Oscars

CHICAGO -  Dr. Linda Mehr, director of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, will be the featured speaker at the 2008 Association for Library Collections & Technical Services President’s Program, “From Here to Eternity: the challenge of managing Oscar's very special collections.”  The President’s Program begins at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, June 30,  at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library, located in Beverly Hills, Calif., is widely regarded as the preeminent facility for the study of film as an art form and an industry.  Although privately funded, the library is open to the public  and is heavily used by students, scholars, journalists, filmmakers, entertainment industry personnel and the general public.  The library contains a comprehensive film-related research collection that includes screenplays, scores, production and costume designs, 10 million photographs, clipping files, 30,000 posters and advertising ephemera, as well as special collections documenting the work of studios, industry organizations and prominent individuals from the earliest days of cinema to the present.  Personal collections in the library are from Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Mary Pickford, Cary Grant, Mack Sennett, Hal Wallis, Ring Lardner, Jr., Jerry Goldsmith, Edith Head, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, to name but a few. These internationally obtained materials exist in a variety of formats. Dr. Mehr will address the issues of collecting and maintaining such a unique collection, among them  acquisitions, preservation, technology, and legal rights.

Dr. Linda Harris Mehr has been director of Margaret Herrick Library since 1982.  She has spent more than  30 years in history and film-related study and work.  She received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 1973, served as a consultant for the American Film Institute in 1977 and for Filmex in 1979,  a project archivist for UCLA in 1979 and  archivist at the Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge, from 1981 to 1982.  She has taught history and film courses at the University of Southern California and the University of California at San Diego, been a guest lecturer at numerous institutions and was selected 1997 Visiting Scholar at Pasadena City College.  Mehr’s publications include “Women and Ethnic Groups in the Media” in Allan Casebier and Janet Jenks Casebier’s “Social Responsibilities of the Mass Media (1976), Motion Pictures, Television and Radio: A Union Catalog of Manuscript and Special Collections in the Western United States” (1978), “Center for Motion Picture Study,” in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (1996), and “The Way We Thought We Were: Images in World War II Films,” in “The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War” (2000).  A frequent presenter at workshops dealing with archives and preservation, Mehr is past chair of the Performing Arts Libraries Network of Los Angeles (PALNet), and current Treasurer of the Los Angeles Preservation Network (LAPNet).

ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association