The Library of Congress Preservation Directorate has received a three-year grant from the Getty Grant Program to support the training of conservation professionals. The award of $141,000 will be matched by the Library to support postgraduate training in preventive conservation, an area of increasing importance in the Library's preservation programs.
"The generous support that the Getty Grant provides will enable the Library to take a leading role in training a new generation of conservators who will be responsible for preserving today's and tomorrow's cultural heritage," said Director for Preservation Mark Roosa.
Over the next three years, senior conservators in the Preservation Directorate at the Library of Congress will train one conservator a year in the theory and practice of preventive conservation. The internships, which offer a stipend, will focus on the development and application of preventive conservation approaches to securing and stabilizing Library materials. Collections in all formats and digital materials that reside in the Library's custodial divisions will provide a test bed for this training, including books, photographs, motion picture films, sound recordings and works on paper.
Instruction will focus primarily on laboratory training, with one month devoted to visiting select museums and libraries to record the state of preventive conservation in practice. The findings will be published in a report.
The Library of Congress Preservation Directorate is responsible for assuring long term access to the intellectual content of the Library's collections in original or reformatted form and for coordinating and overseeing the preservation and physical protection of more than 121 million items in the library's collections. Each year the directorate preserves approximately a half-million items using a variety of techniques and approaches. As the largest preservation program in the world, the directorate maintains a comprehensive and balanced program staffed by 170 individuals that provides preventive and remedial care for materials in all formats.
The Getty Grant Program is part of the J. Paul Getty Trust, an international cultural and philanthropic institution devoted to the visual arts located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Since its inception in 1984, the Grant Program has supported more than 2,500 projects in more than 150 countries. The Getty Trust also includes the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute.
