Preservation staff will be presenting several papers at the American Institute of Conservation annual meeting starting May 20th. Come say hello and hear about topics such as scientific analysis of books from libraries around the country, non-invasive analysis of texts and images of medieval manuscripts, collection surveys, and conservation of an architectural model.
On Friday, March 8th, staff from each division of the Preservation Directorate were invited onstage at Washington, D.C.’s comic convention, Awesome Con, to speak about their work at the Library as part of the convention’s Science Fair. This is their story.
Learn about the Library of Congress’ book detectives. This team of Collection Specialists works within the Collections Management Division (CMD) to find the requested items that have gone missing from their shelf location.
Get to know Preservation’s new Preservation Science Specialist, Franky Moore and read about how he developed a passion for chemistry into a burgeoning career in science humanities.
The Manuscript Map of the Dagua River Region, created in 1764, depicts a remote gold mining frontier in today’s Colombia. Art historian Juliet Wiersema and preservation scientist Meghan Hill will share results from their collaborative analysis which unearthed stories about African resilience, resistance, adaptation, entrepreneurship, and survival within the Spanish empire. A scientific examination of this map further draws back the curtain on how this large watercolor map was assembled using pigments and paper from across the empire.
In 2017, Jeanne Drewes, began an independent oral history project as part of the Occupational Folklife Project to document the occupational trade and work-related experiences of professional bookbinders. Now available, the interviews document the histories of individual binderies, trace intertwined firm histories, and encourage interviewees to discuss how the binders’ occupation and the preservation of books have changed over the years.
Preservation Week at the Library of Congress starts April 24th and it’s one of our favorite times of the year! The trees are blooming and it’s time for the Preservation Directorate to fling open our (virtual) doors and welcome you inside. We see Preservation Week as our opportunity to draw back the curtain and let …
Preservation administration is much like other types of management and administration, except that our bottom line isn’t financial profit. Instead, the goal comes in two parts: maximize the usability of collections in the present tense, and do that in ways that improve their odds of usability in the future. Read on to see how see how the Preservation Directorate is changing approaches to functional organization and budget planning to achieve these goals at the Library of Congress.
