Dr. Cecilia Salvatore, associate professor of Dominican University Graduate School of Library & Information Services in Illinois, is on island to conduct an assessment of the island’s cultural heritage.
She said the artifacts include photographs, books, historic objects and others.
Salvatore told the media at the Joeten-Kiyu Public Library yesterday that as project consultant of the C2C 2010 CNMI CARES Project, which is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Studies, she and project director John O. Gonzales, who is also the library director, is assessing how the different agencies preserve and protect cultural heritage records and collections.
Salvatore said the project is as a result of an extensive Health Heritage Index study done in 2005 which showed that 65 percent of the over 30,000 historical societies, museums, libraries, and collections in the U.S. and its territories reported experiencing damage to their collections due to improper storage.
She said 80 percent of the institutions had no emergency plan in place, and 71 percent of the institutions needed training and staff expertise.
“If we find that training is needed here, we can provide that training for the staff,” she said.
Salvatore’s visit is the first part of a year-long, two-phase project, the second of which will be the implementation of the proposal she will submit based on her assessments of the different agencies.
She will be back here in September or October to continue working on the project.
Salvatore is urging community members to start thinking how they are going to contribute to the preservation of cultural collections in the CNMI.
Salvatore said they plan to conduct mini-clinics on cultural heritage collections and materials, as well as hands-on training on how to organize, store, arrange, describe and preserve the materials and collections.
The C2C 2010 CNMI CARES Project will run through April 2011.
Gonzales said among the agencies they visited for the project were the CNMI Museum, the Division of Land Registration, the Commonwealth Register and the Northern Marianas College Archives.
They will also visit the collections at the Diocese of Chalan Kanoa, the Law Revision Commission library, the Historical Preservation Office, the Public School System and the Board of Education to see that the cultural collections are preserved with an educational perspective.
