CHICAGO - Becky Ryder is the winner of the inaugural LBI George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg Preservation Award. The Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) of ALCTS will present the award on Sunday, June 29, at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony during the 2008 American Library Association meeting in Anaheim, Calif. The 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.
Ryder, head of the preservation
department at the University of Kentucky Libraries, has made a wealth of
contributions to the preservation field. She has an ongoing commitment
to collaboration in advancing the preservation of library and archival
materials and serves as an educator in both formal educational and professional
development settings.
With
her expertise in preservation microfilming efforts, she has readily moved
that expertise into the digital environment. For 12 years she was project
director of the SOLINET/ASERL cooperative microfilming projects. Ms. Ryder
also has served as project co-manager of “Beyond the Shelf: Serving Historic
Kentuckiana Through Virtual Access,” through which 2,700 titles serving
as the premier representation of Kentucky history are available through
the Kentucky Virtual Library. She has been an integral part of the
University of Kentucky National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) team,
since the inception of the program in 2005. Taking lessons learned from
NDNP, she and her institutional colleagues developed the “Meta – Morphosis”
conference to share approaches in converting early newspapers on microfilm
and preserving the resulting digital content. Ryder’s work with
the Keenland Racetrack Library on a hybrid microfilm/digital project makes
available a keyword searchable digital archive of the Triple Crown race
coverage, while preserving the physical volumes and addressing long-term
storage of the digital files.
Ryder’s broader collaborative
service to preservation includes membership on SOLINET’s preservation
advisory committee and her work as an adjunct professor at the University
of Kentucky School of Library and Information Science.
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.
Congratulations to Becky Ryder
on her award as the first recipient of the LBI George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg
Preservation Award.