Tag: #conservation

The Lendrum Internship in Book Conservation

By Freya Chambers

Part 1: My First Book Conservation Projects

Last May, I started the Lendrum Internship in Book Conservation at Palace Green Library. The internship lasts for one year and gives the intern the opportunity to explore the world of rare books conservation through undertaking supervised practical projects to conserve books from PGL’s vast special collections library.

It was my first in depth taste of book conservation after completing my degree in Objects Conservation at Cardiff University and working as a student archive conservation intern at Glamorgan Archives.

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Team Work Makes the Dream Work: My Experience at Durham University

The image is a photograph of Palace Green Library, a historic stone building, under a clear blue sky and in front of the green lawn of Palace Green. Vans and a visitor are passing in front of the building, showing the continued liveliness of the historic space.

By Amber Russell

Becoming a book conservator isn’t easy. Finding a program that will teach you the necessary skills and techniques is difficult enough, then you have to find a job. That’s normally when a post graduate work placement comes into play. Work placement is like a mini-internship, you will generally end up emailing every conservation lab, library, university, or museum you know and ask them, in a politely begging tone, to let you come and do volunteer work with them for a handful of weeks. If you’re very lucky and find someone kind enough to say yes then you get the opportunity to walk into a conservation lab as a volunteer conservator complete with responsibilities and goals and a few projects on your desk, and you do your very best not to blow it. Like I said: not easy. But if you’re very, very lucky you get to work in one of the most incredible settings in the world, with a collection people only dream of, and with a amazing team of not just conservators, but archivists, librarians, and the various staff that keep a collection available to the public. It just so happens, I am very, very lucky, because I was able to spend my work placement at Durham University.

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Book of Transumpt: conservation completed

completed conservation, bound sections, bespoke storage box

A post by Conservator Fiona Butterfield

I recently completed conservation treatment of a Book of Transumpt (1529-1553) that was started pre-pandemic.  The Book of Transumpt (B of T) is a large volume of more than 700 pages each approx 320mm h x 220mm w.  It is hand-inscribed (in Latin) in iron gall ink.  The pages were bound in a limp vellum binding.  It comprised 18 sections made up from 35 sub-sections.  In the original binding sections were predominantly sewn with linen thread and then attached to the binding with parchment tackets.

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Oddy Testing in Conservation

I’m Susan Hull, Graduate Intern in Book Conservation at Palace Green Library. I have been working with Katie Brew, Assistant Conservator, investigating the materials we use for long term storage of our collections.

Recently we received items packaged in unidentified materials. This is a cause of concern; the rate of deterioration of an archival object can increase by way of the substances surrounding it, including packaging. Unsuitable packaging can expose paper archives to volatile substances, which migrate to the object and ultimately contribute to its degradation.

To assess the materials suitability for long term storage, we contacted Archaeological Conservator Vicky Garlick who runs Oddy testing in the Dawson building, for the students of the Conservation of Archaeological and Museum Objects MA.

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Romanesque bindings

A post by Assistant Curator Katie Brew

I have recently been fortunate to attend a five day Romanesque binding course with experienced bookbinder and conservator Arthur Green. It was a largely practical course, attended to gain a deeper understanding of this particular binding style and its construction – to improve my own skills and directly inform the conservation of the early medieval bindings we have here in Special Collections.

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Book conservation in lockdown

What do Conservators do when separated from the archives and rare books they normally work on? One answer is that they make their own! Tony King, our Senior Manager Collections Care and Conservation, describes the process of creating a historic bookbinding.

The history of Western bookbinding stretches back to antiquity and has involved significant changes in the way books are bound, sometimes leading to obvious external differences but often not. Books are complex 3-dimensional objects and working out how a book was put together several hundred years ago requires a fair bit of detective work. Very few descriptions of life in the bindery have survived so the only way to really understand the processes involved is to make a new book using what we believe to be the techniques, tools and materials of the period.

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