February 15, 2011 (REVISED February 23, 2011) Preservation Directorate Hosts New Research Fellowship and New Conservation Training Internship

The Library of Congress announces a new dissertation research fellowship in partnership with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and a new conservation training internship in partnership with the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC), both funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and to be hosted by the Library’s Preservation Directorate. The one-year fellowship through CLIR supports original-source dissertation research in the humanities or related social sciences in the Preservation Directorate’s Research and Testing Division (PRTD). The fellowship is intended for doctoral students whose dissertation project will benefit from the opportunity to closely examine the rich and extensive primary sources held by the Library, working with technical support and expert guidance from PRTD scientists. PRTD is home to several recently renovated science laboratories that include new capabilities for analyzing the chemical, physical, and optical properties of objects using cutting-edge instrumentation for hyperspectral imaging, environmental scanning electron microscopy, x-ray fluorescence, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and other techniques. These technologies offer the latest non-destructive methods of direct examination and analysis of original-source documents and thereby create the possibility for new interpretations of those sources. The one-year internship, hosted by the Conservation Division of the Library’s Preservation Directorate, is part of an inter-institutional pilot program organized by WUDPAC to educate future library and archives conservators. The internship is intended for conservation graduate students who will benefit from the opportunity to work on the vast range of materials in the Library’s collections – from rare books to recorded sound to born-digital materials – and to learn from the expertise of the many specialists in the Conservation Division. The Conservation Division has more than two dozen conservators, expert in the care of books, paper, photographs, audiovisual materials, preventive care, and emergency mitigation and disaster response. This training internship at the Library of Congress, which will be piloted in 2012-2013 and 2013-2014, will help prepare the next generation of library and archives conservators for the full scope of preservation issues facing our nation’s rich and evolving cultural collections. “These new partnerships with CLIR and WUDPAC ensure that scholars can extract information, previously obscured or even invisible, with the aid of expert scientists and conservators through experience gained in the Library’s recently renovated laboratories,” said the Library’s Director for Preservation Dianne van der Reyden. Links to the CLIR fellowship and application and further details on the WUDPAC internship are available at www.loc.gov/preserv/servpubs.html.