LBI Cunha/Swartzburg award for U.S. Newspaper Program

Contact: Charles Wilt


Executive Director, ALCTS


312-280-5030


cwilt@ala.org

NEWS


For Immediate Release,


February 23, 2010

CHICAGO – Robert Harriman and Jeffrey Field, in recognition of their outstanding efforts to promote, coordinate and manage the United States Newspaper Program (USNP), are the recipients of the 2010 LBI George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg Preservation Award. USNP is a collaborative national effort spanning a quarter of a century that brought scholars, historians, researchers, librarians and archivists from 50 states and two territories together to inventory, catalog and preserve the newsprint record of a nation.




The Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) will present the award on Sunday, June 27th, at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony during the 2010 American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. The LBI Cunha/Swartzburg Award is sponsored by LBI: The Library Binding Institute and includes a $1,250 grant and citation.




Established in 2007, the award honors the memory of George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg, early leaders in cooperative preservation programming and strong advocates for collaboration in the field of preservation. The award acknowledges and supports cooperative preservation projects and/or rewards individuals or groups that foster collaboration for preservation goals.




Harriman and Field built a very large, very successful program due to the project design and through their strong organizational and communication skills. They emphasized developing the local leadership among participants and building up local as well as national networks.




Field and Harriman participated in standards development and worked closely with project managers to assure that microfilm produced with combined National Endowment for the Humanities and local funding would meet national standards and library and archive preservation practice. In addition to his leadership role in bringing together preservation scientists to formulate a research agenda, Field contributed to the development of the national standard for newspaper preservation microfilming. Harriman participated in the development and publication of newspaper imaging standards and played a central role in the construction and maintenance of a national newspaper bibliographic database. The project produced microfilm that is available to library and archive patrons everywhere and now is also being digitized to make it accessible online.




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.