The University Library will receive a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The Library will partner with the William R. and Clarice V. Spurlock Museum; the McLean County Museum of History; Heritage Preservation, Inc.; the Chicago History Museum; the Illinois Heritage Association; and the Illinois State Library to develop the Preservation Self-Assessment Program, a free computer-based tool that will help library, museum, and archives staff to conduct physical assessment and prioritization of preservation needs for paper-based and photographic materials. This tool will build upon the project director Jennifer Hain Teper‘s previous work developing a similar tool for assessing audio-visual collections, and will produce a detailed preservation report prioritizing collection items in order of preservation need. The tool will be designed to allow interoperation with other emerging software tools such as the open-source Archives Space collections management tool.
