Welcome to the wiki for the

Colorado Statewide Connecting to Collections Grant Project

RFP for Training Workshops

Request for Proposals: Training Workshops for Colorado’s IMLS Connecting to Collections grant

New Document Added:

Colorado’s Connecting to Collections Statewide Preservation Survey Preliminary Results

The IMLS Connecting to Collections Program will allow Colorado institutions to build upon our informal collaborative efforts to create a Consortium that will provide communication across cultural heritage disciplines. This collaboration will benefit the State’s many libraries, museums, archives, historical societies and other cultural heritage organizations as they struggle with preservation of collections.

Planning Project

To create a culture of emergency preparedness among our institutions and communities, the five partner organizations propose a planning process that includes the key elements outlined in the Connecting with Collections Statewide Planning Grant. Our proposal includes:

• developing of a Consortium of heritage institutions to provide ongoing guidance for the

project and the future implementation. At the final meeting for this project, the Consortium will outline how each organization can take the findings and results from this grant to raise both public and private sector awareness and support for their particular institution type and collections. The group will develop plans for ongoing meetings of the Consortium.

• working with Heritage Preservation to procure the data on the 50 institutions from Colorado

who completed the HHI survey. This data will be analyzed and will provide a baseline data set for the two surveys - an online statewide survey and twelve onsite surveys.

• conducting an online survey to reach a greater portion of the 1200+ cultural organizations in

Colorado and conducting twelve, two-hour onsite surveys. Visits will be conducted at selected institutions representative of the cultural heritage community. Consortium leaders will emphasize the importance of the survey to the organization they represent, identify institutions that may need to receive a hard copy of the survey and determine the onsite survey participants.

• offering 2-3 day training workshops and conference sessions based on survey results in

different regions of Colorado at state conferences. Workshops will address the most urgent collections needs as identified by the survey results. Possible workshop topics may be emergency planning, response and/or recovery training, conservation services, or environmental control. Consortium members will present the findings of the surveys during sessions at the CWAM, SRMA and CAL conferences. Additionally, at least 100 staff and volunteers will access the online streaming video presentations of the sessions and workshop material, participate in a blog and/or wiki and use the online training modules.

A final report with evaluations and recommendations for the fields will be produced and published online. The report can then be used by institutions across the state to start the conversation with governing officials, like trustees and community members about the “state of the state” of collections care and crisis. That final report will also create a map for continued cross-disciplinary collaboration and implementation in Colorado.

Partners:

Growing out of advisory committee discussions a Consortium with five lead partners has been formed in order to meet this challenge. Partners include: the Colorado-Wyoming Association of Museums (CWAM), BCR’s Digital Preservation Services unit –which includes the Collaborative Digitization Program (BCR), Colorado Association of Libraries (CAL), Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists (SRMA), the Colorado Historical Society (CHS), and the Colorado State Library (CSL.)