Archives

In 2011, senior conservators Morgan Zinsmeister and Terry Boone of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), thoroughly documented, conserved, and encased a copy of Magna Carta that dates to 1297.  During his presentation at AIC’s 41st Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, Zinsmeister recounted the project.  His presentation, which I’ve summarized in this post, beautifully illustrated …

Joan Weir, conservator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, gave an informative Contemporary Art Session talk about the exhibition of Richard Serra’s 9’ by 21’ oil paint stick on paper, Untitled, 1974. She presented information about Serra’s working methods, and discussed challenges that conservators may encounter when working with oversize contemporary works of art on …

When faced with a budget dilemma for oversize mining maps storage, Amy Williams, project conservator at the University of Pittsburgh, asked herself “the $13,500 question:” Is there a benefit to using an archival 12” diameter storage tube core versus a non-archival 12” core wrapped with an isolating layer? It would be easy to assume that …

William Minter and John Baty presented the results of this aging study of particular relevance to those of us working with archives and library materials. The hypothesis: “Encapsulated acidic sheets will degrade faster than unencapsulated sheets”. The question driving the testing was whether deterioration products from the paper can become trapped in the encapsulation, thereby …

Digitally printed books are still in their infancy, with the onset of personal, customized and on-demand publishing, made possible in part by the internet. As they have become widespread, the understanding of their aging characterestics must be understood. This is made more critical by the variety of techologies and materials used, as well as the …

[a conservation conundrum: "wait, later this will be nothing"] Erika Mosier, Paper Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art, presenting on behalf of co-authors Brenna Campbell (Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Conservation, MoMA) and Scott Gerson (Associate Paper Conservator, MoMA), highlighted some of the conservation and exhibition challenges presented by Snow, a major book project …

New York-based paper conservator Daria Keynan and Amy Hughes, third-year graduate student at NYU Institute of Fine Arts, shared exciting new contemporary cleaning techniques that have the potential for more effective and efficient treatment of paper-based objects by custom-matching the pH and conductivity modular stock solutions to the original object. This presentation was a wonderful …

  I knew very little about Richard Serra’s works on paper prior to Im Chan’s interesting presentation.  She had the challenge of examining and housing a collection of Serra’s enormous oil stick prints at the National Gallery of Art. First she explained how the prints were made using a combination of screen printing and oil stick.  The oil …

Encapsulating an hour-and-a-half discussion into a blog post isn’t easy, but fortunately the speakers in the Book and Paper Group’s Archives Conservation Discussion Group, “Is it real?: The value and ethics of using surrogates,” riffed on a few common themes, namely: When is it appropriate to use surrogates in place of original materials? and What …

Soyeon Choi, Senior Paper Conservator, and Jessica Makin, Manager of Housing and Framing Services, divided their presentation into two parts: first they addressed the treatment of one individual pastel portrait, then they described a variety of housing options used at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, a regional conservation center in Philadelphia. The …

Caveat: This review presents very little of the data from this study, but is instead a quick overview so that you know what the Herblock team is working on and what to look forward to in the published study. This presentation addresses a looming problem in the conservation of 20th century material culture – the …

A slight communications glitch caused the group from the Indiana State Museum Tour to start without the group that was only doing the Indiana Historical Society tour; we knew that they were supposed to rendesvous with us, but they didn’t know that we existed. We finally caught up with the other half of our tour …

The fourth presentation of the Book and Paper Group session examined neither a book nor an object on paper, but instead a print on plastic: Roy Lichtenstein’s 1964 Sandwich and Soda, a screenprint in red and blue ink on plastic. The object occupies a sort of conservation no-man’s-land: it’s a print, so it’s not something …

After long, long neglect, the humble American scaleboard binding has seen a surge of interest in the last few years. Two articles feature scaleboard bindings in the recently published compilation Suave Mechanicals, Volume 1, edited by Julia Miller (Suave Mechanicals: Essays on the History of Bookbinding, volume 1. ed. Julia Miller. Ann Arbor: The Legacy …

“The Next Chapter:  Rare Books in Modern Times” conference had an ambitious goal, to offer talks of benefit to anyone with a professional interest in rare books. The conference was presented by the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, and hosted by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. One of the aspects I most …