Conservation Treatment of a WWI Panoramic Photograph, a guest post by Alisha Chipman, Senior Photograph Conservator in the Conservation Division at the Library of Congress. This panorama is part of the Nelson W. Jordan family papers held by the Manuscripts Division. Nelson W. Jordan (1842-1922) was born enslaved in Albermarle County, Virginia.
The Preservation Directorate is in the process of a web redesign and content project for the Preservation staff intranet and public internet sites. As the program and communications intern, Alanah Richardson has conducted informational interviews with staff from all four Preservation Divisions to assess priorities for the redesign. After conducting these interviews, a survey for Preservation’s professional societies was created, intended to gage audience reception of the Preservation website.
This blog will take you on a journey of a special behind-the-scenes project carried out by the Collections Management Division to map the storage location areas of the largest library in the world to improve collections management, security, access, and emergency preparedness and response.
Staff at the Library of Congress love to showcase the collections with the public. As exhibitions are being planned , the Conservation Division (CD) and Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD) have been collaborating to assess the items selected for display. As part of this process, staff in CD typically review every item in an exhibition to determine how to safely display it. This review includes evaluating possible treatments, the kinds of mounts or cradles for display, and various ways that lighting might affect the item.
Prior to the rise of printing, medieval libraries were filled with handwritten, manuscript books and documents. Many of those items no longer exist in their original form; some were thrown away when their contents became outdated or no longer useful, others were discarded and replaced with printed books. But some were taken apart, and their covers and pages were repurposed. Some of these pages, which are called fragments, can be found in the collections of The Library of Congress. This post is about a project to conserve these fragments.
