Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass receive ALCTS collaboration citations
Contact: Charles Wilt
Executive Director, ALCTS
312-280-5030
cwilt@ala.org
NEWS
For Immediate Release,
February 23, 2010
CHICAGO-The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is awarding the ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Citation to two distinguished libraries. This year’s recipients, in recognition of their outstanding collaborative partnerships are: the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, which is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries and research institutions organized to digitize, serve and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity; and the Juliette K. and Leonard S. Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning N.Y.
Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), in a noteworthy collaborative effort, has fulfilled a scholarly need by providing open access to a large corpus of historical materials on biodiversity within the biological, ecological and environmental sciences. BHL has grown into an international collaborative digitization project by working with 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries and research institutions in the United States and United Kingdom. Through digitization and preservation, materials are made available, over an open access platform to scholars and researchers globally. The ability to locate, identify, retrieve the materials and, most importantly, to locate and identify specific organisms by their scientific names is seamless yet shows a high level of sophistication within BHL’s digital interface.
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/)
The glassware collection housed within the Juliette K. and Leonard S. Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass serves a much smaller user community, that of researchers and collectors of glassware by individual glassmakers. Nevertheless, this small but important collection of Carder Steuben glassware has been made accessible by collaboration with an outside organization, the Carder Steuben Club. In early 2009, it was discovered that there were 800 photographs of Carder Steuben glassware that were contained within the archives of Frederic Carder at the Rakow Library. These photographs were never cataloged or published anywhere. The Rakow Library collaborated with the Carder Steuben Club to examine these photographs before scanning and digitizing these images. The photographs are now preserved and housed in archival-quality folders after bar-coding them for inventory control purposes and embedding thumbnail images into the library’s catalog (
http://tinyurl.com/yzszfre)
The citation will be presented at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony on Sunday, June 27, at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.
The ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Citation recognizes and encourages collaborative problem-solving efforts in the areas of acquisition, access, management, preservation or archiving of library materials. It recognizes a demonstrated benefit from actions, services or products that improve and benefit the provision and management of library collections.
The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is the national association for information providers who work in collections and technical services, such as acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, preservation and continuing resources in digital and print formats.
ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.
