Myanmar Preservation Training
In 2016, I traveled on behalf of ASU Library to Myanmar to present a series of workshops and presentations about library preservation over the course of two weeks in October.
The first week of the program consisted of two hands-on training workshops in basic book repair and box making that were supplemented by a three-part series of “video workshops” to give additional background information about library preservation issues. Because there were too many participants for a single in-person workshop each day, I came up with the idea to split them into different groups, and have them rotate between the three different hands-on workshops and the three different video workshops. This allowed me to have a more manageable number of people in the daily in-person workshops, but allowed everyone to do each workshop over the course of the week.
The hands-on workshops included instruction in basic circulating book repair methods, and box making featuring the “Five Minute Phasebox” style.
“Each book has it’s own special problems…” “Congratulations! You found your book’s special pain!” 
Me in front of my slides, translated into Burmese 
Demonstrating hinge tightening 
Measuring a book for a phase box 
Answering questions during the open question session 
Group picture of the Yangon workshop participants
The video workshops combined found videos related to bookbinding, conservation, and preservation with my own filmed footage and narration. Each of the three videos had a certain theme: “History of Bookbinding”, “Care and Handling of Library Materials” and “Conservation”. Each of the three videos were between 2 and 3 hours long, with a total run-time of 8 hours.
Each day also included an open-ended special question-and-answer session where the participants were free to ask me any questions they had about specific problems in their libraries or collections, or to get clarification on what we had gone over the previous day.
The final day of the Yangon workshop brought the entire group together for a fun series of activities which included: taking a practice “dexterity test”, and a contest to create their own Preservation outreach materials.
A sample of the preservation outreach materials created by participants during the last day of the Yangon workshop 
Some of the demonstration materials available to participants 
A workshop participant attempts to refold a map during a practice “dexterity test” 
Preservation-themed bookmarks created by Hla Hla Win