What I Do

Conservation

Conservation work consists of inspecting an item in great detail, understanding its materiality, damage, and needs, and acting to prevent or decelerate further deterioration. This can be done through interventive or preventive conservation. Interventive conservation often involves making changes to the object directly by repairing, supporting, or consolidating elements to stabilise or improve the current condition of the item. This can cover a range of treatments, from removing a minimal amount of surface dirt to dismantling, washing, and resewing the pages of a book and replacing its cover. The extent of interventive treatment is determined in a dialogue between the conservator and the custodian of the object, based on the conservator's judgement, the object's history, and the custodian's future plans for the item. Preventive conservation, on the other hand, focuses on controlling the object's surroundings and so influencing the rate at which chemical and physical changes take place in the object. This can be done by storing the item in appropriate housing, which acts as a protective barrier between the object and external threats like pests, inappropriate handling, light damage, or fluctuating humidity. Alternatively (or ideally, in addition) to boxing, the object's stability can be improved by influencing environmental conditions such as humidity, temperature, storage, and light. Interventive and preventive conservation go hand in hand, and where possible both are employed together to protect an item from chemical and physical (mechanical) deterioration.

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Book conservation not only cares for documents like book pages, pamphlets, letters, deeds, or maps, but also looks after the binding or enclosure of these objects. This means that book conservators work with a huge variety of materials, including paper, parchment, leather, textiles, and sometimes wood and metal. The binding of a book can be just as revealing about historical events or practices as the content, and so it is important to preserve the physical evidence for how a book was made or treated throughout its lifetime. Because of this, every conservation treatment is accompanied by detailed photographic and careful written documentation, and any original material that is removed during conservation treatment is kept with the object. As conservators often get to see parts of books that are hidden when the book is intact (like the linings on a book spine, for example), documenting what we encounter is important, as it enables access to hidden information about the provenance of the book.

Work Experience

Practical experience in the field is essential for learning about professional practice, familiarising oneself with the requirements of the profession, and developing the skills and techniques necessary to perform conservation work to a high standard. I am very lucky to have been able to work on real objects from the very beginning of my course at West Dean College, and so was able to develop my technical skills from the start - always conscious of the ethical implications of treating and altering historic material. I am fortunate to have been able to develop my skills outside of my studies in several internships and work placements, all of which have greatly benefitted me by teaching me valuable skills and setting me on the path to becoming a conservator.

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My most recent internship was at the conservation department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, where I worked on two conservation projects which were full of new and exciting treatments. For example, a collection of some of Pablo Neruda's poems from the 1920s was printed on paper that had become very acidic and brittle to the point where the corners simply snapped off on turning a page. The whole book had to be deacidified by immersing the leaves in baths of water at different temperatures, and some enriched with calcium. I had washed paper before, but the facilities at the Staatsbibliothek allowed me to explore this technique on a large scale, where the entire book could be treated at once. My other conservation project was a copy of Ptolemy's Cosmographia, an early printed and hand coloured collection of maps. While I unfortunately ran out of time to finish the project due to the Coronavirus lockdown, I did spend a long time documenting and admiring the illustrations in the book - the oldest I have treated so far. At the Staatsbibliothek, I also got to experience how exhibitions are set up, and how much work is involved in preparing the display cases so that the objects on display are safe and presented to the visitors in an appealing manner. In Berlin, I also got the chance to become more familiar with the technical language in German - since I only studied book conservation in the UK, I did not know any technical terms in my mother language. Now, I am much more comfortable expressing myself in German on a professional level.

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Last year, I gained some valuable insights into institutional conservation interning at The National Archives in Richmond, UK. There, I got my first exposure to working with parchment, having been set the task of humidifying and flattening the limp parchment cover of a late 16th century account book which had become extremely distorted over the centuries. This project gave me the wonderful opportunity to explore some historic stationary binding structures. Reading about this type of binding (textblock sewn on strips of leather or parchment, with the cover attached via secondary parchment tackets) and creating a model to explore the structure visually and tactilely very much helped me to understand the historical structure with which I was working, and facilitated treatment.

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I also spent two weeks at Sussex Conservation Consortium, where the wonderful conservator Ruth Stevens ACR shared her work space and time with me and taught me a lot about working as a private conservator. She had organised for me to work on a box of single leaf documents from Middletemple Archives, which presented quite a logistical challenge considering I worked on a large number of objects at once. The documents were diverse, they even included some coloured prints and a set of hand drawn plans on tracing paper, and needed different levels of attention. Some items were mouldy and needed to be treated with alcohol, others required washing, and others still needed to be humidified and flattened. I took a lot of time repairing tears along the edges and folds in the paper, and figured out a system for placing the documents in layers, so that I could work on some items while others were drying. Apart from the technical skills I learnt working on these items, this placement was valuable training for time management skills.

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My first exposure to the professional world was a week long internship with Caroline Bendix, a library conservator who leads an annual project caring for the Codrington Library at All Souls College, Oxford. The project involves surveying the condition of every book in the library, shelf by shelf, and making repairs and bespoke enclosures where necessary. This is all done in situ in a temporary workspace set up in the historic library itself. The nature of the work was very different from the work I knew from West Dean, and the benchwork most book conservators usually encounter. Working on site, as opposed to remotely from a fully equipped studio, presented both advantages and challenges. Knowing the exact position of each book on the shelf and being able to observe the risks to the collection first hand means that treatments can be tailored to the individual book's needs more than they can when little information is available about the shelving conditions of the book. Often, in-situ treatment is sufficient to stabilise a book, and so this kind of work can save a lot of time and effort, and makes it possible for books to be treated that would not otherwise receive attention, or could not be transported off site. The limited tools and materials in a temporary workshop can be problematic, but also provide an opportunity to reconsider what we often take for granted in the studio, and to be creative and make do with what there is. The week at All Souls was incredibly good practice in effectiveness and efficiency, as well as a treat, being around beautiful books in a breathtaking setting.