I work in the Binding & Shelf Preparation Department (part of PDCD) in the Columbia University Libraries system. The great thing about working in this department is seeing books come in for the very first time as well as some of the oldest books that continue to circulate regularly in our collection. I learned to […]
Category: Preservation
Recreating a lost Yiddish database: The LCAAJ Project
The Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ) is an extraordinary resource for research in Yiddish studies. It consists of field interviews recorded between 1959 and 1972 with Yiddish-speaking informants conducted by Columbia University’s Department of Linguistics, who donated the Archive to Columbia University Libraries in 1995. The Archive presents an interesting preservation challenge, […]
Is Your Google Book Incomplete? We May Be Able To Help.
As many people know, Google has digitized hundreds of thousands of books from libraries around the world, including Columbia University Libraries, and they’ve created Google Books, a wonderful resource for readers and researchers. Subsequently Columbia and many other libraries have contributed their Google digital versions to HathiTrust to assure that the e-books are preserved into […]
A Brief History of the Preservation Reformatting Department
Columbia’s Preservation Reformatting Department (PRD) began as a reprographic services unit back in the 1930s. In the 1970s-1980s, the department gradually became a reprogaphy unit with an emphasis on the preservation of brittle and deteriorating materials. While the Preservation Division was taking shape, the world was just beginning to understand the slow moving disaster headed […]