April 26 – May 2, 2026
Preservation Week
Is This Thing On?
Preserving Memory and Building Archives
Why preservation?
Preservation Week inspires action to preserve your collections. We believe that memories and treasures should last a lifetime and beyond, and that these physical and digital materials support both community and cultural identities. Focusing on preservation for a designated week every year raises awareness of the role libraries and other cultural institutions play in preservation, by sharing information to help make informed decisions that help your collections last for the future.
The 2026 Preservation Week theme is Is This Thing On?: Preserving Memory and Building Archives.
Connect your community through events, activities, and resources that highlight what we can do, individually and together, to preserve our personal and shared collections.
2026 Honorary Chair
Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty
“Preservation is documents and artifacts, recordings, digital media and all the tangible information that requires our professional advocacy and stewardship–the love and sweat of our labor. However, beyond all of that, most importantly, preservation is MEMORY and memory is the people and the communities who make them…
The programming offered by ALA Core in honor of Preservation Week 2026 will amplify ways to build archives and expand our awareness beyond independence of libraries and archives in preservation work to interdependence with our communities to dissolve barriers.”
Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty is an American librarian, curator, educator and cultural heritage administrator. She most recently was appointed as Deputy Commissioner of Visual Arts for the City of Chicago in 2024 and is the former director of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, DC. With extensive experience across academic, public and museum library sectors Evangelestia-Dougherty previously served as Associate University Librarian for Rare and Distinctive Collections at Cornell University, Director of Collections and Services at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at New York Public Library, and Executive Director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago. A respected leader in the library and museum community, Evangelestia-Dougherty concurrently teaches cultural heritage administration at California Rare Book School at the University of California Los Angeles and serves as a member of the American Antiquarian Society and the Caxton Club.
Evanglestia-Dougherty holds an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons University, where she studied archives, collective memory and historic and cultural documentation and preservation. For Evangelestia-Dougherty’s distinguished service and contributions to the profession, she received an honorary doctorate of library and information science from Simmons University in 2023.
In addition to cultural heritage work, writing and teaching, Evanglestia-Dougherty has served as a consultant to libraries, museums, and educational centers. She has presented and consulted on collaborative cultural heritage projects including the IMLS funded Diversifying the Digital Historical Record (2017), keynote speaker for Digital Preservation Coalition (2024), serving on the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) board of directors (2022-2024) and most recently contributed to the Morgan Library and Museum publication: Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy (2024) and the Andrew W. Mellon funded Chicago Monuments Project for the City of Chicago.
Evangelestia-Dougherty’s professional ethos aims to embed holistic advocacy for libraries and museums into civic culture through preserving, interpreting, and making natural and cultural heritage accessible thus activating common narratives of purpose for research in a global context.
Visit past Honorary Chairs and recorded presentations
#PreservationWeek