Conservation as Dendritic Maps: An Interview with Paper and Book Conservator, Yasmeen Khan

(The following is a post by Charlotte Giles, South Asian Reference Specialist, Asian Division)

The Library of Congress is well known for its unique and rich collections. What is often hidden are those who share their expertise and knowledge with the institution to make these holdings visible to the larger world. This blog, 4 Corners of the World, hopes to highlight the background and work of some of these individuals. This post is part of a short series of interviews (listed in the “Further Reading” section), which allows us to capture a piece of the institutional knowledge and history of Library employees who contribute to the International Collections, especially those who often work beyond the public eye. While staff work is what allows researchers to conduct research, their presence in the Library is also foundational to the creation of the culture at the Library. The Library of Congress’ story and history is comprised of those from within and beyond North America.

Yasmeen Khan was the Head of the Paper Conservation Section in the Library’s Conservation Division. She worked at the Library of Congress from 1996 until her retirement in 2025. This interview was conducted in the fall of 2024.

Charlotte: Thanks for making time to chat with me. Please tell me about what spurred your interest in art and book conservation.

Yasmeen: My father was a big antique collector. We always had beautiful things in our house – paintings, sculptures, art books. In my earliest memories as a kid, around four years old, I would be bored at home. And when I would sit on a chair, my parents put this big book of Rembrandt’s paintings on my lap, and I flipped through it. Whenever I wanted to know something, I would ask an adult wandering by to read a bit to me. My father had illuminated manuscripts, mainly South Asian ones, and Persian and Ottoman ones. He would experiment with conserving them, using odd sprays and varnishes. In hindsight, I’m kind of aghast.

I was interested in art, but I never thought of it as something that one pursued. My focus was always on the book, with a particular interest in illustration.

Charlotte: Then how did this art and literature-steeped upbringing lead to your professional training?

I studied the natural sciences in high school in Sweden. Afterward, instead of going to school in the U.K., I took an extra year to visit the U.S. and decided to stay on for college. I was interested in art history. I ended up with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies, with as many art history courses as they offered in Middle Eastern and South Asian art at Columbia University.

I was a research assistant for one of the curators of Islamic art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The curator also happened to be one of my main professors who taught Islamic art at Columbia. I told her I wasn’t interested in teaching or being in the museum curator environment. My experience was one of curators who took the warfare amongst themselves out on their research assistants and graduate students. My professor recommended I look into conservation. So, I went to the Met’s conservation lab, and they showed me around.

While I was there, I met a researcher who had recently gone to Pakistan to visit papermakers in Sialkot (Punjab, Pakistan). Unfortunately, between the time that the famous paper-making historian, Dard Hunter, wrote about them in the 1930s, and the researcher’s visit in the 1980s, paper-making in Sialkot had disappeared. This experience was significant for me because it showed that conservators were interested in doing research in a place like Pakistan and that there are opportunities in the conservation world, which was, at that time, primarily focused on Western materials.

I found out that to get into conservation school, you need science, art, history, and a good studio art background. Knowing this, I started painting. I also did a lot of drawing and printmaking. The courses I took during my time at Columbia also helped. There, I took chemistry, and as a language hog, also Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and German. While at Columbia, I had an opportunity to do a semester in Egypt at Al Azhar University in Cairo to study Arabic and Islamic history. All this served me well to launch into conservation.

When trying to figure out my next step, I found out there was a conservation program at Columbia University, but they didn’t have money for international students, so I went back to Islamabad, Pakistan to work at the Institute of Folk Heritage. I noticed there were advertisements in the newspaper from the German government for scholarships in engineering and science education programs. I wrote the German Foreign Secretary in 1985 and asked some of my professors like Annemarie Schimmel for recommendations. While all this was happening, I got married in 1986 and moved to Spain with my husband where he was living. Later that October, I got a telephone call from the German embassy in Pakistan. They said, “We have a paid practicum for you and you can start in the fall of 1987.”

Charlotte: What did you do after your training in Germany?

I was in Munich at the Bavarian State Library for six months, then West Berlin while the Berlin Wall was still up at the National Library of Germany. I returned to Pakistan in 1988 as there was a “bond” as part of my scholarship, requiring I work in Pakistan for at least 2 years. At the time, there was major political upheaval and change in the country. It was an exciting time to be there. However, I was told that I would be a disruptive force to the National Archives of Pakistan and National Museum of Pakistan due to my training, so I was not allowed to work there, and the bond was removed.

Further emphasizing how I unsettled the establishment, I recall an episode when I was visiting London. While I was there, I visited this fantastic bookshop (now closed) called Hussain’s, which was entirely focused on South Asia and colonial literature. It was run by the person who would become Pakistan’s Secretary of Culture. He said to me, “You’re going to be better educated than everybody who is going to be above you [in Pakistan conservation circles], Yasmeen. And you’re a woman, and that’s going to create a lot of friction.” It was really sad.

I did some private work. I was one of the founding members of the Folklore Society of Pakistan. But they were all political people who didn’t want to do any exhibitions. Both my husband, an American citizen, and I also worked for the International School in Islamabad. At that time, we weren’t going anywhere professionally, so we traveled a lot.

During our time in Pakistan, the CIA was everywhere because of the Taliban. My husband would occasionally take me to the American Embassy Club, and it was full of journalists and flak jackets, males out thumping their chests. It was very much like the movies. When you’d go out to the Juma (Friday) Market, you’d have to keep an eye out for bombs. The thing was to stay away from bicycles and donkeys.

Charlotte: It sounds frustrating that you weren’t able to work in Pakistan with the kinds of materials that originally inspired your work in this field. What brought you to the U.S.?

We left in 1991 and came back to the U.S. because my husband wanted to go to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. I started working at the library there. I ended up getting a job as a conservator at the Harry Ransom Center. A year and a half into that, Columbia University divested itself of its rare book and manuscript conservation program, and it moved to UT Austin in 1992 and started taking students a year later. I was in the first class of that master’s program. It was about four and a half years long, ending with an internship. We had to do a lot of conservation, applied chemistry, book history, and bibliography classes in Library School and the English Department.

I remember on the first day of an internship at the Bavarian State Library I was invited to a dinner party by the library’s director and head of preservation. He took me aside and said, “Yasmeen, you clearly have a strong academic background. Are you sure you want to do this hand-work?” And I said, yes. While I was there, my mentor told me there are only two worthwhile places to work in the conservation of rare books and manuscripts in the U.S., where they know how to do things properly. One is the Harry Ransom Center, and the other is the Library of Congress. So, we moved to Washington, D.C. where I went to the Smithsonian for my UT Austin internship. This internship allowed me to get my foot in the door to the conservation world in Washington, D.C., eventually leading me to the Library of Congress.

Charlotte: Once you were at the Library of Congress, what kind of work did you do?

In the Conservation Division, I’m a little unusual because I moved around a lot within the division. Initially, I was hired in 1998 as a conservator on contract to work in the Paper Lab with graphic arts collections from the Prints and Photographs Division. Then I got a five-year contract to work on paper projects for the National Digital Library.

I liked paper conservation, but my real love was book conservation. During my five-year contract, a position opened up in the Book Lab. I worked as a book conservator until 2017. I then did stints as team lead for exhibits for six months, conservation team lead for digital projects for 4 years, which I guess gave me the experience to become the section head for the paper section.

Most of my time was spent assessing collections, designing and doing treatments, liaising with custodians, exhibitions, digitization, and a lot of research. I’ve published on Middle Eastern and Islamic manuscripts, and worked with my colleagues to design and test novel treatments that could be applied by the broader conservation community. I also researched and wrote about the changes in the role of conservators, and conservation ethics and philosophy.

Charlotte: Could you say a bit more about the research you’ve done on ethics and philosophy in conservation?

I gave a presentation with a colleague about changes in the role of conservators. While conservation training was object- and science-focused, the role has morphed over time. It has become more people-focused.

You need to have judgement about treatment. But as one goes higher up in the profession, one doesn’t do as much treatment. One is much more focused on processes, and there’s a loss of judgement. As you design treatments for others, you may lose judgement because you’re not doing as much treatment yourself.

Charlotte: Do you find that as you are doing the treatment you need to pivot; that something doesn’t work, and you have to go back to the beginning?

You don’t design just one protocol. Everything is a contingency. Protocols are like dendritic maps, tree root maps. If this works, then this is where I’ll go. If this doesn’t work, then this is where I’ll go. You have to design all of the options.

Muscle memory is a big thing. There is a cost if you don’t keep training your eye and your hand. For example, you can’t do beautiful sewing, put it aside for months, and then pick it up and expect to do it at quite the same level. For the eye and the hand to work together, and your sense of touch, it takes a little time to get that back again.

Charlotte: You’ve worked as both a book and paper conservator. How do these two come together in the mending of an item?

One of the main problems book and paper conservators must deal with is the different ways that paper is made in different cultures. Books and paper also deteriorate in slightly different ways. For example, the paper of a book is made in one culture, and there’s a binding that is best suited for that kind of paper. That is the way it might have been originally bound. Then, it somehow travels to another culture, say to the US in the late 19th century where it was rebound in a style that does not work harmoniously with the indigenous paper from whatever country it came from. This is often the case with Middle Eastern and South Asian materials.

That is a big problem – inappropriate binding structures. As conservators, we have to take the book apart, mend the paper, and then put it in a structure that is more harmonious with the paper. You’re not trying to restore it to a certain time period. You’re trying to make it harmonious with its paper, and yet, show that this new binding is actually created in the early 21st century. This amounts to being true to our time while also being respectful of the book or paper. For me, I want somebody to see a book that has been treated. There shouldn’t be any confusion about what is contemporary and what was done in the past.

There are times where the book is in a binding of the culture that produced the book, but the paper has deteriorated over many years. It cannot be put back into that kind of binding because that binding style was predicated on fresh new materials. This is an issue with lithographs from the 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly those from South Asia.

We’ve found that things that have lasted hundreds of years are hardier than things that deteriorate in 50 to 100 years. There’s the concept of “inherent vice” in conservation: when paper or whatever material is made, there are weaknesses in the chemical structure of that material which will cause it to deteriorate at a certain rate. Some things, like newspapers are created in a certain way because they’re not meant to last.

Charlotte: Thank you so much for chatting with me and tracing your roots in the world of conservation. Do you have any final words about what your plans are after retirement?

My husband, who retired a year before me, and I have travel plans to see our family and friends around the world, and also visit places that are on our “places to visit before we die” list. I am also continuing with research on Islamic manuscripts, informally consulting on conservation matters at D.C. cultural institutions, and volunteering in the Conservation Division through December. I am very, very gradually removing myself from the world of conservation.

Further Reading

The following are other interviews conducted by Charlotte Giles in this series.

“Working with the Three-Dimensional and Functional Book: An Interview with Dan Paterson” (December 23, 2024)

“A Long and Dedicated Journey Through Libraries: An Interview With Phong Tran” (May 8, 2023)

“Thirty Years of Cataloging the South Asia Collection: An Interview with Shantha Murthy” (November 29, 2022)

For an earlier interview with Yasmeen, see the Law Library’s blog In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress for “An Interview with Yasmeen Khan, Senior Rare Book Conservator at the Library of Congress” (December 7, 2025)