Abigail Flanigan awarded Jan Merrill-Oldham Professional Development Grant

CHICAGO – Abigail Flanigan, a student in the Masters of Library Science Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has been awarded the 2015 Jan Merrill-Oldham Professional Development Grant.

The Jan Merrill-Oldham Professional Development Grant is given by the Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) to support travel to the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference and Exposition.

The $1,250 grant, sponsored by the Library Binding Institute, is intended to provide librarians and paraprofessionals new to the preservation field with the opportunity to attend a professional conference and encourages professional development through active participation at the national level. The grant is to be used for airfare, lodging and registration fees to attend the ALA Annual Conference. The recipient will attend the Preservation Administrators Interest Group meeting and at least one other PARS interest group meeting. The recipient will write about the experience for ALCTS News.

Flanigan holds a Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2013) and is expected to complete her MLS at the University of North Carolina in 2016. She also works in the Preservation Department in the University Libraries as a Carolina Academic Library Associate, a competitive merit-based assistantship offered to University of North Carolina students in the School of Information and Library Science pursuing careers in academic librarianship.

In the early stages of her graduate education, she has already decided to pursue a career in preservation, having developed, in her words, “a passion for preservation librarianship.” Abigail’s essay demonstrated awareness of the challenges of analog preservation and reformatting as well as deep interest in digital preservation. She recognizes that “preservation plays a complex and vital role in any library” and she is already engaged in the fundamental question of all preservation professionals: preservation and access.

The award will be presented on June 27 at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony during the 2015 ALA Annual Conference and Exposition in San Francisco, CA. ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.