Paper Conservation: Decisions & Compromises

New Trends in Preservation in the Digital Age: New Roles for Conservators
Dianne Lee van der Reyden
Former Director for Preservation, Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress, USA
Introduction
The role of conservators has broadened during
the last several decades. This is driven in part by
changes in cultural institutions, such as the Austrian
National Library, the Library of Congress
and others, because they are now stewards of
an ever-increasing variety of documents, written,
imaged, or otherwise captured in multiple
media and formats. As this interim ICOM-CC conference
shows, these formats range from atlases
and albums to architectural drawings; broadsides
to books of hours and herbaria; codices to
cartoons; iron gall ink manuscripts to medieval
illuminations; parchments to prints and photographs;
and wall paintings to wall paper. Add to
this legacy motion picture films and recorded
sound cylinders, cassettes, compact discs, and
other electronic analog and digital media, and
the scope of formats and resultant issues facing
today’s libraries, archives and museums (LAMs)
can be daunting.
But there are several emerging trends that
expand a conservator’s capabilities in our digital
age. This paper is intended to challenge conservators
and other cultural stewards with a premise,
a problem, and some solutions, based on those
trends.
Premise
There are billions of cultural heritage items requiring
preventive and interventive conservation
actions. This fact was documented in the US by
the 2004 Heritage Health Index Survey of the
nation’s collections 1 , which showed that institutions
holding primary source materials face the
following specific challenges:
• Collections, which are in fact a cultural institution’s
business assets, are extraordinarily
and increasingly, vast and complex, with a
large percentage requiring preventive and/or
interventive care. Consequently, more surveys
of collection needs and demography are required
to help cultural stewards prioritize the
allocation of dwindling resources, based on
value, use and risk criteria relevant to respective
collections. 2
• Institutional staffs often lack sufficient resources
and, in some cases, training. Therefore,
more educational opportunities such as
the ICOM-CC conferences, and more innovations
such as automation, are needed to maximize
efficiency in the face of all too frequent
staff reductions, especially as institutional
responsibilities multiply. 3
• Contemporary collections can be as vulnerable
as any. It is imperative that more research into
the needs of modern media is designed, funded,
conducted and disseminated, before the
records of our current-day accomplishments
vanish without a trace. 4
Problem
Despite the desire for digitization to solve the
problems of collection preservation, the fact is
that collection complexity, exacerbated by inclusion
of digital material, is growing, not slowing,
while resources are reduced or reallocated to
scanning projects. What can conservators do to
stem the tide of loss of collections?
Solutions
Conservators are among the most effective advocates
for cultural stewardship. We can stem the
tide of loss by harnessing digital technology to
advance emerging trends in libraries, archives
and museums. By harnessing these technologies,
we can develop solutions for the preservation of
original primary source materials to strengthen
and advance the following:
• Science-based research for preservation, to
support the needs of collections and conservators,
and other scholars, through research and
development (R&D).
• Cost-effective preventive preservation for improved
access, to support efforts of cultural
stewards through automated storage and display
systems and environmental monitoring.
• Preservation partnerships and conservation
collaborations with funders and allied associations,
to support students and professionals
through hybrid educational endeavors, such as
webinars, online courses, and other exercises
ICOM-CC Graphic Documents Working Group Interim Meeting | Vienna 17 – 19 April 2013
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