Ways to Celebrate Library Preservation Week in Your Community

What is Preservation Week?

Preservation Week is sponsored by Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures, which is a division of the American Library Association. The goal is to promote the preservation of personal, family, and community collections alongside library, museum, and archive collections. Libraries can celebrate this week with their community and demonstrate the important role they play in preserving information.

The Preservation Week website provides resources, promotional materials, and ideas for celebrating and promoting preservation. The great thing about Preservation Week is that regardless of your organization’s size, there is a way for you to promote preservation and educate your community members.

We’ve included a list of ideas to celebrate Preservation Week, including free and inexpensive activities, partnerships, and film viewings.

Free and Inexpensive Activities

Create handouts to increase awareness. You can create your own handouts or use the promotional materials available on the Preservation Week website. You can keep your handouts on the reference desk or check out area and give them to patrons who come in to check out materials.

Host a story hour. Invite families and children for a story hour and use the time to educate them on how to care for their books. You can include a craft activity like teaching them how to string binding and make craft paper books.

Create a preservation exhibit. You can put items on display that have been preserved alongside those that still need repairing. If you have before photos of the items that have been repaired, display those so people can see the difference preservation makes.

Host a film screening or book club. Choose a film or book title with a preservation theme and host a screening or book club meeting to discuss. 2022’s Preservation Week’s theme is "Preservation in the Face of Climate Change," so consider that when looking for titles to use.

Host an event to show how a book repair is done. If you do not have anyone at your library who can demonstrate, you can use this as an opportunity to reach out to another local organization for a partnership.

Host events on the preservation of family heirlooms. There are many options to choose from when thinking about family treasures. You could host an event on fabric storage for family quilts, wedding dresses, etc. You could also create a digital catalog of scanned handwritten family recipes for the community or host a class on scrapbooking or digitizing family videos.

Partnership Opportunities

Invite a local preservation expert to speak. You can reach out to local historical societies, museums, or universities for any preservation experts that would be willing to come and give a presentation at your library or community center.

Consider virtual events. If you’re looking to form a partnership with a preservation expert but don’t have the ability to host an event at your library or can’t work within their schedule for an in-person event, organize a virtual presentation. This kind of presentation would work especially well for one on photo digitalization.

Host a family photo digitization class/workshop. Partner with a local historical society, museum, university, or any other local organization that works with historical preservation. Have a discussion and presentation on preserving and digitizing photos. You can have people submit photos in advance for your partner to preserve ahead of the class.

Celebrate Preservation Week Your Way

You know your community best and should base your events on the community’s interests and needs. The ideas above are just a starting point, but you can take them and plan a week of events that work best for your library, whether it involves partnering with community organizations or promoting preservation through handouts and displays.