The journey of Iconographie du Musée du Val-de-Grâce
As I type this, the journey of Iconographie is coming to an end... It's got a home and will have a space on the shelf in no time. One of my favourite things is when I am part of the journey of a library item from beginning to the end (the end being on the shelves and ready to be retrieved from the stacks, rather than fueling a fire or another horrible pulpy death).
The arrival of Iconographie to the library from the cavernous off-site store marked my first 'proper' project working with the conservation and preservation team. I was given this old, dusty box full of sheets upon sheets of loose plates and text and asked to collate and prepare it for cataloguing. This meant re-organising the sheets into their original order (acting as detective and looking for clues if it proved to be less than straightforward; no page numbers, for example, meant looking at paper creases, folds and old staples or holes and piecing it back together). The item itself is a box of awesomely gory plates and loose leaves of french text from the "Archives and documents of war Military Medical Service". Having not read French since GCSE, and going by the catalogue, it falls under military medicine and reconstructive surgery and wounds, injuries and rehabilitation.
After that it was all down to making the item presentable and request-able so I began with conserving the loose sheets by cleaning each page using dry surface paper techniques (that's a small conservation sponge to me and you). It was tricky in parts, as the paper quality and thickness of surface dirt varied throughout the set but using enough judgement I was able to remove the dust and dirt from the pages and ensuring that the original piece was left unchanged. Less is more, in this case. If cleaning or conserving the paper led to losing the original integrity or purpose then I would leave it - rather that, than erase a piece of history in some way.
Preservation was next, so any fragile pages (especially loose title pages) I put in measured melinex wrappers (spot welding - yes, welding! - any loose segments) and eventually measuring for boxing so it could be housed, retrieved, and transported extra-carefully. I even did the labeling and sent it back to the stacks...
So there we have it. A little life cycle of some items I deal with when I say I work with conservation (but trust me, I do do other stuff too!) I'm not a trained professional, just curious, creative and relatively good with my hands...
After that it was all down to making the item presentable and request-able so I began with conserving the loose sheets by cleaning each page using dry surface paper techniques (that's a small conservation sponge to me and you). It was tricky in parts, as the paper quality and thickness of surface dirt varied throughout the set but using enough judgement I was able to remove the dust and dirt from the pages and ensuring that the original piece was left unchanged. Less is more, in this case. If cleaning or conserving the paper led to losing the original integrity or purpose then I would leave it - rather that, than erase a piece of history in some way.
Preservation was next, so any fragile pages (especially loose title pages) I put in measured melinex wrappers (spot welding - yes, welding! - any loose segments) and eventually measuring for boxing so it could be housed, retrieved, and transported extra-carefully. I even did the labeling and sent it back to the stacks...
So there we have it. A little life cycle of some items I deal with when I say I work with conservation (but trust me, I do do other stuff too!) I'm not a trained professional, just curious, creative and relatively good with my hands...
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