Job summary
Kara M. McClurken is the Director of Preservation Services, a unit within Content Stewardship. She oversees all activities related to physical and digital preservation for the University Library, which includes audiovisual conservation, book and paper conservation, book repair and protective enclosures for circulating collections, commercial binding, digital preservation, disaster preparedness and recovery, environmental monitoring, outreach and consulting.
Professional profile
Kara is currently the co-Principal Investigator of the CLIR Hidden Collections project, Book Traces @ UVA, discovering uniquely modified copies of pre-1923 books in the circulating collections of Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, supported by a grant from CLIR. She also serves on the Advisory Committee for the Academic Preservation Trust and is the past president of the Preservation and Reformatting Section of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services of the American Library Association.
Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, Kara served as Preservation Field Services Librarian for the Southeastern Library Network and worked in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College as a project archivist and preservation specialist.
Kara has served on a variety of preservation and emergency preparedness committees and task forces in the cultural community, including the Society of American Archivists and the American Library Association. Kara consults and teaches on a variety of preservation topics, including disaster preparedness and response, preservation management, and archives preservation.
Kara has an M.L.S. with a concentration in Archives and Preservation, an M.A. in history from the University of Maryland where she worked in both Special Collections and the Preservation Department, and her A.B. from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.