Recent Job Postings

Paper Conservator for the Harvard University Library (Project Paper Conservator)

Head – Library Binding Section, Library of Congress

Paper Conservator, Museum of Islamic Art (Doha, Qatar)

Internship in conservation of works of art on paper, Tate Britain (London, UK)

Why Leslie Long comes to work singing …

PCAN welcomes contributions of many flavors and formats, and here’s a first: an audio ode by Leslie Long to the beautiful if damaged books that arrive on our cold, powder-coated shelves for treatment. Listen! Enjoy the text and the simple reminder that we should come to work singing!

Why Leslie Long comes to work singing (.mp3)

It has often been said that we must not judge a book by its cover.

No doubt this is sometimes true. Beautiful words might be contained within humble covers: dark blue paper, dulled and scarred over decades, bullet-proof burgundy buckram. And inside? War and Peace! Winnie the Pooh!

But let’s consider those book covers designed by artists like Margaret Armstrong, Sarah Wyman Whitman, Maxfield Parrish and Will Bradley. The content between their covers might be magnificent, but if not, who cares? The book is beautiful. It’s a work of art. It’s a lovely thing.

During the years between 1890 and 1913, the period of the great artist designers, fueled by the spirit of the Arts and Crafts Movement to restore beauty and grace in everyday objects, even the most uninspired writing (Myrtle Reed’s novel Flower of the Dusk or Paul Leichester Ford’s Wanted! A Chaperon, could have an awe inspiring cover.

So what, if the content is not “intellectual.” So what, if it’s merely a “cream puff of perishable fiction.” It has a lovely face. It’s dressed well. It has glistening gold letters and soft pink butterflies and bright yellow flowers and bold green ferns on its cover.

When these beautiful books come to us torn and broken, our hearts leap up. Ah, a cover worth keeping, a stand-alone object of delight, a bright beacon in a dark flood of ugly buckram and rotting leather. If the insides are good, too, that’s whipped cream and a cherry!

We’re lucky! We celebrate the exuberance of the artist designers who worked at making book covers fascinating, before the invasion of the dust jacket that accompanied the beginning of WWI. We’re lucky! We know the beauty of books. We patiently practice skills in that important creative tradition.

Even if we think we can’t write something great (though maybe we can!), even if we think we can’t make our own great covers (but I’ll bet we can!). We know we can preserve the great books that surround and nourish our spirits.

Every day we should come to work singing, inspired by the beauty around us, sometimes within the covers; sometimes on them.

Recent Job Postings

Preservation Administrator, University of Miami Libraries

Preservation Librarian, Northwestern University

Preservation Coordinator, Wisconsin Historical Society

Visiting Media Preservation Coordinator, Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Dan Cull writes on “Conservation on the Cyber Frontier”

In the new issue of e-conservation Dan Cull writes on the history of the internet and how it has intersected conservation and where we might go with it.

The adoption of the internet as a major component of the conservators work is well underway, particularly of note has been the adoption of a wide array of Web 2.0 technologies within the conservation profession. The question remains to what extent conservators can fully broaden their collaborative efforts to access their creative collective imagination and knowledge and where this may take them within cyberspace.

This is what PCAN is trying to do, too…adopt technology as a way to broaden our collective knowledge and provide a forum for our work. What do you think readers? I’m sure Dan would love to hear from you, too.

Shameless plug: We need more contributors for PCAN. Your humble editors want to prove that this Web 2.0 thing is not a fad but a useful tool for a geographically and institutionally diverse community.

American Institute for Conservation transforms their treatment catalogs

The Friends of the American Institute for Conservation (FAIC) received a generous grant from NCPTT in 2008 to transfer their conservation catalogs to a wiki.

The wiki version of the Catalogs will allow editors to work collaboratively and efficiently to update and augment the Catalogs, and will provide much broader access to these resources, ensuring that innovative methods and materials are documented and widely disseminated to practicing conservators and conservation scientists.

Read more at the AIC Blog. Each AIC specialty group has their own catalog, although some are more populated than others. If you want to help with any of the catalogs, contact the chair of the specialty group in which you are interested.

2009 RBMS Preconference Documents Available

This year RBMS with the help of OCLC has posted online selected presentations and documents (including audio) from the 2009 preconference.

Among the many interesting talks, Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies, Cornell University, presented a paper titled “Preservation and Large Scale Digitization” at the Plenary Session IV. You can hear her presentation and get the PDF from the above link.

A big thanks to RBMS and OCLC for making these presentations available. We need more of our professional organizations willing to post conference reports, documents and audio like this.

Timothy Barrett, 2009 MacArthur Fellow

Tim Barret has been named a 2009 MacArthur Fellow. Tim is the founder of the papermaking facilities at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. He has worked tirelessly to research historic papermaking methods, and is a dedicated and well-loved educator. From the MacArthur site:

Timothy Barrett is an internationally recognized master craftsman and paper historian who is preserving and enhancing the art of hand-papermaking through his work as a practitioner, scholar, and teacher. Combining the skills of artist, ethnographer, scientist, and historian, he documents and demonstrates centuries-old hand-papermaking practices that may otherwise be lost.

More information is on the MacArthur website, including a list of the other 2009 Fellows. Congratulations Tim!

The Importance of Library and Archives Conservation (and Why We Should Continue Training Library and Archives Conservators)

By Beth Doyle, Collections Conservator

Conservation is at the core of my library’s mission to “acquire, organize, preserve, and deliver information resources and assist users in their effective use.”1 Every day we provide collection materials to students, scholars, historians and the public. Students certainly come to find information to fulfill assignments but researchers also come to find their family histories, facts for legal arguments, health and scientific information, or background material for their great American novel. Of course our patrons not only come to use our physical collections, they use our digital collections from their dorms, offices, homes and even the coffee shop down the street.

The conservation staff is critical to our mission to provide access to and preserve our collections both in their original forms and in their digital surrogates. If we place any value on the history and information contained in our collections then we must also place a value on the education and employment of conservation librarians. Our goal as librarians and as conservators is to put collections in the hands of people who want to use them, to help make connections between ideas and people who will take those ideas and create new and wonderful things. We are here to make sure that happens today, tomorrow, and decades from now.