Sign up for the next C2C Care Webinar, RE-ORG: Step-by-step Storage Reorganization for Small Museums. It’s Free!
Date/Time: August 5, 2015, 2-3:00 EDT
http://www.connectingtocollections.org/re-org-step-by-step-storage-reorganization-for-small-museums/
As museum collections continue to grow, adequate storage space is becoming a rare commodity. A recent international survey indicated that roughly two thirds of collections in storage were at serious risk. With poor storage conditions, it is challenging for museums to use collections for enjoyment, research or education; moreover, effective emergency response may be compromised. Re-ORG, developed by ICCROM and UNESCO, is a step-by-step methodology to assist small museums in reorganizing their storage areas for better access and conservation. The focus of RE-ORG is on making improvements to existing storage areas, and not on planning and building new facilities. This webinar is an introduction to the RE-ORG methodology and various tools (both current and upcoming), and to the Canadian Conservation Institute’s RE-ORG: Canada training program.
Featured Speaker:
Simon Lambert holds a B.A. in art history and Italian literature from McGill University, and obtained a Laurea in paintings conservation at the University of Urbino, Italy and an M.Sc. in the Care of Collections at Cardiff University, UK. Simon is a Commonwealth scholar and recipient of a 2010 ICON Conservation Award (UK). After completing his studies, Simon worked for two years at ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Restoration and Preservation of Cultural Property) in Rome on the planning and implementation of international professional training activities about cultural heritage protection in times of conflict, and on developing didactic web-based tools for the reorganization of museum storage. Simon joined CCI in 2012 as Preservation Development Advisor in Preservation Services. His current interests include museum storage planning and reorganization, the sustainability of museum activities, and standards for museums.
Category: Outreach and Advocacy
Information on how to help advocate for conservation and preservation concerns at the local, state and national level.
C2CC Webinar: Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, Oh My! Sharing Museum Collections through Social Media
Join Connecting to Collections Care on July 14 at 2:00 EDT for a free webinar:
Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, Oh My! Sharing Museum Collections through Social Media
Social media has infiltrated our lives, and it’s no longer restricted to personal use. Many cultural institutions are using social media outlets very effectively to connect and communicate messages to a wide variety of audiences. There are so many choices and platforms and ways of engaging with the public, which can make even just the term “social media” seem overwhelming or daunting. Whether you’re completely inexperienced or you’re looking to refine or streamline and make the most of your efforts, this webinar will provide an opportunity to learn more about what is out there, how different platforms are being used, and will provide tips for effectively using social media to share your collections, which ultimately assists in furthering access and preservation.
Presenters:
Molly Gleeson is the Rockwell Project Conservator at the Penn Museum (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology). She works full-time in the museum’s open conservation lab on Egyptian mummies and artifacts. Molly received her M.A. from the UCLA/Getty Master’s Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials in 2008 and her B.A. in Art Conservation from the University of Delaware in 2002.
Tom Stanley is a Public Relations and Social Media Coordinator at the Penn Museum. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in 2007 from Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pa., where he studied Communications with an emphasis in Broadcasting.
Sign up:
http://www.connectingtocollections.org/facebook-and-twitter-and-instagram-oh-my-sharing-museum-collections-through-social-media/
43rd Annual Meeting – Book and Paper Session, May 16, “Let me Help You Help Me: Outreach as Preventive Conservation”, Library Collections Conservation Discussion Group
The structure of this session was three brief presentations followed by three breakout groups to discuss each of the presentations, with the presenters rotating between the groups.
Laura McCann, Conservation Librarian at NYU Libraries, was the first presenter and spoke about library training of student employees.
She gave an interesting presentation on the process their library has undergone in developing a more efficient and successful training program for student workers. Originally the Conservation Department of 3 staff members conducted hands-on training of small groups of students through workshops. While this had benefits of being able to design their own teaching content, increasing awareness among para-professional staff about the work of conservation and library materials preservation needs, and improving communication between conservation and other departments, there were problems such as the students being distracted during the workshop or not attending due to scheduling conflicts, and conservation issues not being correctly identified or work being poorly performed by the students when in placement.
By reaching out to the other library departments, a new approach was devised. Now there are fewer sessions and they involve a presentation (not hands-on) and pizza! The students’ managers are present and the sessions are compulsory. This has resulted in less conservation staff time required in training, more students receiving the training and a large increase in the number of library books correctly identified for conservation treatment.
The next step from here is to adapt this model to other situations, such as NYU’s new allied libraries in Brooklyn, Abu Dhabi and Shanghai with the challenges of geography and time differences added to the usual constraints of limited conservation resources and staffing. Ideas that they are exploring include Preservation Training LibGuides and short video tutorials.
Dawn Walus, Chief Conservator at Boston Athenaeum, spoke next about outreach and access at her institution.
The Boston Athenaeum has a wide and varied outreach program. They hold architecture tours of the building, open house events for the public to view spaces such as the conservation laboratory, evening events with their curators, tours and workshops with groups of young children, and an annual conservation fundraising evening. Members have special events such as specific tours and conservation lab visits, and digital images of the collection made by the digitization team feature in a digital photo frame in the membership office.
As well as public encounters, the Boston Athenaeum offers summer institutional exchanges, internships in conservation through a relationship with the North Bennet St bookbinding school, and scholarships for researchers to study the collections available in the research room. They also take advantages of public curiosity of collection institutions through articles in traditional and social media.
This last point linked well to the third speaker, Suzy Morgan, Preservation Specialist at Arizona State University Library, who spoke about using social media to promote conservation.
Social media is a very powerful tool that conservators can use to direct and control the conversation about conservation without the message being misrepresented or diluted by traditional media. She pointed out that it is resource-light, requiring ‘only’ staff time and not expensive equipment, specialized staff (such as IT) or knowledge.
People are very curious about conservation, so there is a fresh audience out there waiting to respond to your efforts. The online community is very interactive, allowing you to have a conversation with both positive and negative responses, and presenting teaching moments as well.
Some advice Suzy gave was to look at how large institutions are using different social media platforms and copy the approaches you like. Be humorous, allow for some silliness, and keep it short. She reminded us tha the work conservators do is very photogenic and social media platforms are ideal for sharing photos, sound clips and short videos, which often represent our work better than text.
Finally, she said that there are lots of resources on the internet to explain ‘how to’; don’t be discouraged by the well-established platforms that large institutions have, be prepared to give it a try – start small take it slowly, and have fun.
Discussion groups
The three presentations were followed by breakout groups where each presenter came to speak to a group about the issues raised in their talk.
Laura McCann:
– Q: How many students per year do you train?
– A: About 20 people; they are tied into the general student orientation program for the library. Also, they use short training videos for patrons and para-professionals.
– Q: Have you made your own training videos?
– A: No, not yet. Need management approval. Also, some rare book departments might want more hands on or intensive training for their materials.
– Q: Could we crowd source this?
– A: In theory some of these information guides should be able to be assembled collaboratively, but each institution will likely want to add their own specific or specialized information. Other ways of distributing information include putting information cards around the library and in the reading room, or using table tents to inform general readers.
Dawn Walus:
– Q: What is a good/not good age range for children to come and tour a conservation lab?
– A: Young children can really appreciate a ‘book hospital’ or ‘make a book’ workshop experience and then take home a souvenir to show to siblings and parents; teenagers are hardest to engage – insist on no cell phone usage in the lab
– Have workshops on old audio-visual equipment, as some people still have these things at home but don’t know how to use them
– Q: How can you tell is your lab tours or other outreach programs are a success?
– A: Speak to docents to see if they get questions about conservation programs; have a kids activity table and monitor its usage; talk to membership office and see if have increase in memberships or donations
Suzy Morgan:
– Q: Is the social media you do part of a larger institutional social media program?
– A: No, they are personal accounts, but contribute to the library’s larger social media efforts
– Q: What is your favorite platform and which are the most effective?
– A: Suzy is into Twitter and Tumblr and having a go with Vine; she hasn’t tried Instagram. Tumblr is easy to start, has no length limit, can post text, photos, video, links etc and also schedule posts for future release. Each platform has its own style; some are more personal and interactive than others. You need to work out your communication style and decide on the audience you want to reach, then write appropriately.
– Q: Do you have restraints on your content ?
– A: No, because she is doing it through personal accounts. To avoid onerous institutional policies, it takes time to build management trust in the social media program to see that no inappropriate content is released.
– Q: Any advice on gaining institutional trust?
– A: Start by offering to help with the social media program, provide content and slowly build up your involvement. Show examples of other institutions’ successful social media programs to build faith in your own.
– It was noted that some institutions force staff to spend large amounts of time contributing to social media programs, and that can adversely affect the time available to spend on other work. If this is the case, ask for help from other staff/workshop participants etc and delegate. You could also point back at your job description if social media is not included.
43rd Annual Meeting – Book and Paper Session, May 16, “Unlocking the Secrets of Letterlocking to Reseal the Letters of John Donne and Other Early Modern Letter Writers", Jana Dambrogio
Jana Dambrogio, Thomas F. Peterson Conservator, MIT Libraries, presented the first of three sections in this talk – an introduction to the work she and others have been doing to discover letterlocking.
As letterlocking models were handed out to the audience, Jana began by defining letterlocking as “the folding and securing of any object so that it becomes its own sending device”. This is a 10,000 year tradition, Jana said, dating all the way from Mesopotamian clay tablets to Bitcoin.
Examples of letterlocking Jana showed included the letters of Tomaso di Livrieri at the Vatican secret archive and the letters of Queen Elizabeth I. Queen Elizabeth used more than ten techniques in her letters, often with two techniques per letter.
Jana described how letters of this type have traditionally been viewed simply as two-dimensional objects. But as a result of this research conservators and scholars are beginning to look at them as 2D/3D hybrids, and they must be treated accordingly.
Jana and her colleagues have been constructing models of the locking techniques based on evidence in the original letters. Jana believes that making models of letterlocking techniques is helpful because they are both a learning tool and a teaching tool for discovering and sharing the patterns.
If the goal in conserving these letters is to preserve their past function conservators are faced with the decision of what to repair and what not to repair, and the question of how to preserve the evidence.
During her talk Jana highlighted recent collaboration such as with Nadine Akkerman of Leiden University in The Hague, with Daniel Starza Smith of The University of Oxford, and with Heather Wolfe of the Folger Shakespeare Library. See links to various demo videos, blogs and publications that have resulted from these collaborations at the end of this post.
Daniel Starza Smith spoke about applying letterlocking to literary history.
Normally scholars look only at the text they can see in letters. But now they are learning to look for folds, seals, and intentional damage – the damage that occurs as a result of opening a letter. These days Daniel asks himself ‘what other messages are there than just who the letter is from and to?’
He took us through some basic background on the development of the writing and sending of letters, from a manual for letter-writing, The English Secretary published in 1586 by scholar Angel Day, to the relatively modern invention of the commercially-produced paper envelope in the mid-19th century.
Daniel noted that the word “secretary” itself comes from the idea of secret keeping. A secretary is one entrusted with secrets, and literary scholars such as Daniel are occupied with revealing secrets and unpacking texts – now in a physical sense.
Delving into the letters of John Donne, Daniel revealed that Donne would use as many as four techniques in locking his letters. Why would you need four ways of locking? For various different purposes, including security and aesthetics. In fact there was even a class difference in the way letters were folded; your folding technique said something about you as a person. Some methods were simple and some were complicated – even “fantastically difficult” – and this reflected on your own sophistication and status.
Daniel concluded his talk with the following three main take-aways:
- Tiny bits of evidence are key in deciphering the folding/locking patterns, and these details are revealing about the history of communication.
- This research has the potential to reach further than just scholars
- The collection of Donne letters – from which much of this research has stemmed – numbers only thirty-eight. More data is needed, and this starts with conservators.
At the beginning of her portion of the talk Heather Wolfe emphasized three points that have come to light during this project.
- The importance of a three-way dialogue between curators, conservators, and scholars.
- This dialogue leads to discoveries, and informs decision making in conservation when considering whether or not to treat
- The need to standardize letterlocking vocabulary, referring to physical details. This is especially important in treatment documentation, and also for catalog searching.
In what Heather described as the “pre-envelope era” a letter was a single leaf that was transformed into a packet. Tearing was required in order to open the letter, and this is the damage we can see today that aids in reconstructing the locking patterns.
Communication with Jana was informative for interpretation of the collection at the Folger – Heather noted that the type of evidence in question tends to me more visible to conservators. For example, Heather no longer refers to the area bearing the address as the “address leaf” of the letter, but rather the address panel of the original packet. Heather went so far as to say that physical evidence such as the folds and intentional damage contains information critical to the interpretation of the letter itself.
She reiterated Jana’s remark that it is very difficult to imagine the folding and locking patterns without practice, and this is the reason they decided to make models.
In letters from the 16th-17th centuries there is evidence of hundreds of riffs on just a handful of basic techniques, such as the pleated letter genre, and the papered seal genre in which a strip is harvested from the letter itself to use as the locking mechanism. The many riffs tend to be associated with specific people.
Finally Heather took us on a whirlwind tour of these various letterlocking genres, but particularly highlighted the technique of binding a pleated letter with silk floss, first used by Queen Elizabeth I. Heather pointed out that while many letters would have been written in the hand of a secretary taking dictation, the nature of this technique suggests more intimacy. Letters of this type were usually written in the hand of the person composing the letter on high quality thin Italian paper.
Question and answer
Q: Have you seen any evidence of postal censors opening letters?
Heather said that she had not seen this specifically. But in the same vein she noted that a distinctive triangular-shaped 20th century Russian letter from the WWII front that was invented due to adhesive being forbidden.
Daniel pointed out that in the early modern period, people would sometimes employ a seal forger, in order to open and re-seal letters; he has seen some examples of this.
Q: Are you presenting these findings to archivists (specifically for the purpose of standardizing vocabulary? Where will you be publishing the vocabulary?
Heather said that the vocabulary is still in development, but that there are currently a lot of resources online, such as the MIT TechTV videos, the youtube letterlocking channel, and blogs. Heather has written in a recent British Library publication on pleated letters, and Jana has a forthcoming article.
Demo videos
Check out the video demos of letterlocking, hosted by MIT TechTV.
Blog posts etc:
A post by Heather and Jana at the Folger
Jana’s letterlocking website
Jana Dambrogio guest post on whatisaletter.wordpress.com
Publications:
‘Neatly sealed, with silk, and Spanish wax or otherwise’, a chapter by Heather Wolfe in the British Library’s In the Prayse of Writing
AAM’s Direct Care Survey: Please complete ASAP
As I recently wrote about on the Conservators Converse blog (http://www.conservators-converse.org/2015/02/direct-care-and-conservation/), the AAM has formed a task force to better define the meaning of “direct care” in regard to deaccessioning. This issue has a direct impact on funding for preservation and conservation at museums. Unfortunately, their task force did not include any conservators but now it is our chance to be heard. Anyone, not just AAM members, can fill out the short survey.
The link is:
https://newknowledge.az1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_cIb6SW5TiJB6GBD
The survey deadline is tomorrow, Mar. 4, so please complete it ASAP and forward it to other conservators.
PMG Winter Meeting – "New Photo Histories in West Africa" by Erin Haney, Feb. 21
This was the final session of the 2015 PMG Winter Meeting. Speaker Erin Haney is an art historian and co-founder/co-director of Resolution, which hosted the 2014 “3PA” workshop in Benin. During the Q&A afterward, one conservator remarked that her talk “reminds us why we do what we do.” That couldn’t be more true. She provided an exciting glimpse of family and private photograph collections in West Africa that have not been widely seen nor studied. The stewards of important West African photography collections have recently started to come together to explore strategies for their preservation as well as raising their visibility worldwide.
She began by saying that West Africa has valuable historic photographs that won’t come up on Google searches. The reason is simply that these photographs tend to be dispersed widely in private and family collections. There are very few cultural institutions, archives and museums that have enjoyed stability from the colonial era to the present day. Some institutions have lost all or part of their photographic collections in times of political upheaval. Instead, it is primarily families and private owners who have safeguarded that region’s photographic heritage.
Haney showed just a few examples that reflect the diversity of images that can be found in these collections. These include photographs made during the colonial period, the images made by the great, early studios (often now in family collections of their descendants), domestic portraits, group portraits, and events of social and political importance. There are images of the social elite and the wealthy, showing a materially rich and cosmopolitan West Africa that is seldom seen, and a history that is seldom taught. She showed a daguerreotype by Augustus Washington, who went to Liberia from the US and made daguerreotypes in cities all along the West African coast. There were photographs made by the Lutterodt family, which established a far-reaching network of family photography studios that operated from the 1870’s to the 1940’s. There were British colonial scenes, portraits by early French-run studios, portraits of West African women and their Bordeaux trader husbands, and debut portraits–young women dressed in the finest cloth, showing their readiness for marriage. More recent images included Gold Coast soldiers, independence movements, city skylines and infrastructure, and prominent political figures. These are but a few of the many treasures in these collections, spanning the 19th and 20th centuries. There is an extraordinary variety of subjects and photographic traditions.
She showed how photographs were made and remade in order to improve them and preserve them. Some photographs took on new meaning as memorial objects when the sitter passed away. These could be marked with crosses, mounted, and/or captioned by loved ones. Other photographs that had condition issues over time might be heavily overpainted to refresh them. In one case, a painting of a Dutch ancestor was remade by photographing it, in order to present it alongside a group of other family portrait photographs. The original image was not sacred. To study these collections, one has to understand how the images functioned when they were made and how they continue to function. Theirs is an iterative practice of artistry, which must inform preservation and conservation decision-making.
Of grave concern today is that these collections are at risk when the custodians feel they must sell or dispose of them to reclaim the valuable space they occupy in a private home, or generate much-needed income. Resolution communicates the importance of photographic cultural heritage to people in West Africa and around the world. The Benin workshop provided participants with the skills to document and manage their collections, while networking with others in the region working toward the same goals. The workshop involved nine countries in Francophone West Africa and is actively building partnerships and capacity to make a case for the ongoing support of photographic collections. There is a growing recognition of their critical importance for national identity, education and research. It was an inspiring end to this PMG Winter Meeting.
Help make Museums Advocacy Day a Success
Although registration for participating in Museums Advocacy Day 2015 here in Washington, D.C., is now closed, there is still much you can do from home. Advocates will be personally visiting Congressional offices in all 50 states on February 24 and 25 “to send a unified message to Congress about the value of museums and how federal policy affects their ability to serve the public.” The American Alliance of Museums (AAM) is coordinating this effort, and you can help by writing letters to Congress, sharing AAM’s postings on Facebook and Twitter (hashtag #museumsadvocacy), and using AAM’s advocacy tools.
Last year, more than 300 advocates visited Washington, D.C., for Museums Advocacy Day. If you are interested in joining them next year, be sure to check the AAM website to learn about registration this fall.
AAM’s resources:
- Advocate from Anywhere: http://www.aam-us.org/advocacy/museums-advocacy-day/advocate-from-anywhere
- Advocacy Resources: The Alliance offers several resources for building your advocacy skills, learning about Congress, making your case and getting involved in advocacy for your museum. http://www.aam-us.org/advocacy/resources
Museums Advocacy Day 2014 By the Numbers:
- More than 300 advocates gathered in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 24–25
- Advocates visited 335 Congressional offices in all 50 states
- Over 1,100 #museumsadvocacy tweets
- Two Great American Museum Advocates
- Hundreds of letters sent to Congress
- Six congressional champions
Information for this post was taken from the AAM website, http://www.aam-us.org/advocacy/museums-advocacy-day. Visit their website to learn more, and reach out to your Congressperson to let your voice be heard.
Peek into the past: AIC/MFA Boston's Pam Hatchfield Opens Revere's Time Capsule
Conservator Pam Hatchfield, head of objects conservation at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and AIC’s board president, had the rare opportunity to excavate and open the oldest known time capsule in the U.S. The capsule was stored in the Massachusetts State House, wedged tight inside a cornerstone, and Hatchfield spent 7 hours carefully removing it. On January 6th, Hatchfield opened the box and removed its contents using a variety of tools, including a porcupine quill.
Hatchfield appeared on a local news show, Greater Boston on WGBH News, to discuss the time capsule and her process, accompanied by Michael Comeau, the executive director of the Massachusetts Archives and Commonwealth Museum. They talked with WGBH News Arts Editor Jared Bowen. You can watch the video of the interview here.
Documentary film 'The Destruction of Memory' looks at the issue of cultural destruction
Following is a note from Tim Slade about his film project that may be of interest to conservators and those who work with cultural heritage:
My company, Vast Productions, is producing a documentary film called ‘The Destruction of Memory’, which looks at the issue of cultural destruction and efforts to stem it. The film, based on the book of the same name by Robert Bevan, looks back over the past century at how legislation, policy and awareness have followed behind the path of destruction, and focuses its lens in particular on Bosnia, and recent and ongoing narratives in Mali, Egypt, Syria and Iraq.
Interviewees include architect Daniel Libeskind, ICC Prosecutor Bensouda, former MINUSMA Head and current Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders, ICTY Expert Witness András Riedlmayer, and with recent interviews of Corine Wegener of the Smithsonian Institution, Amr Al-Azm of Shawnee State, and other key players in current efforts in the Middle East.
We are currently running an Indiegogo campaign to complement broadcaster and other funds, and it would be great if you can spread the work. This is a project we are very passionate about. Our team are highly experienced, and have worked on documentaries that have screened at festivals like Sundance, and been nominated for and won Academy Awards.
Our fundraising page is here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-destruction-of-memory–2
Our Facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/destructionofmemory
Thank you,
Tim Slade
Vast Productions, New York
Look for the Heritage Health Index survey in your inbox
The Heritage Health Information 2014; A National Collections Care Survey (HHI 2014) is the only comprehensive survey to collect data on the condition and preservation needs of our nation’s collections. Heritage Preservation, in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is pleased to announce this new study as follow up to the success of the Heritage Health Index 2004.
You can help us with this key endeavor by responding to the call to participate. Selected institutions will receive an email to participate beginning the week of October 20th. We encourage you to participate in this important survey. Look for the email OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS – The HHI 2014 National Collections Care Survey is here! and help us to ensure the preservation of our nation’s treasured cultural heritage in archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, scientific research collections, and archaeological repositories.
With your help and support, the HHI 2014 will once again prove to be a fundamental tool in the effort to preserve our shared heritage.