dk nkf - Nordisk Konservatorforbund Danmark

Diversity, commonality and connectivity
Before this conference, I suspect a lot of us thought
of industrial conservation as a field devoted mainly
to industrial artefacts like transportation vehicles
and large machinery. But as we’ve learned in the
talks of this conference, it also encompasses the
objects that were mass-produced by manufacturing
machinery. And as if that weren’t enough, now I
find it also refers to large-scale, modern industrial
processes like mass deacidification, cold storage,
the application of flame retardants to textiles and
digital documentation and copying.
Ironically, as our first key speaker pointed out,
industry has created many of the problems that we
face and industry is now coming back to help us solve
these problems. You could say things have come
full circle, but it would probably be more accurate
to describe it as an upward (or perhaps downward)
spiral. Every new solution that industry bestows upon
us seems to create more problems for the future, and
it is virtually certain that industry will come to rescue
us from all the imperfect advances in technology and
materials that are in store. And on and on it goes.
When you look over the program, the scope of our
work really is absolutely breath-taking. It ranges from
huge industrial sites like the mines and buildings
at St.Just in Cornwall, the pulp and paper mill at
Klevfos, Norway, the open air museum at Den Gamle
By and the Carlsberg brewery to individual buildings
containing machinery, like the Zollern Colliery in
Dortmund, Germany. It encompasses large individual
artefacts, like the vehicles at the Science Museum in
London¸ the SS Great Britain in Bristol and the USS
Monitor in Newport News, Virginia, all of which
contain a large number of individual machines
and mechanical devices. The scope extends even
further to include small individual items like Swiss
watches, canvas paintings, phonograph records and
players, paper documents, woodworking tools and
celluloid films. Physically, these individual items
moderator speech by george prytuLaK
are small compared to the large outdoor objects and
sites, but what they lack in size they make up for in
sheer numbers. And make no mistake: dealing with
thousands of deteriorating wrist watches, tons of
paper or truckloads of film is every bit as challenging
as dealing with a corroding iron bridge, and I would
argue, no less important. Truly it’s a measure of our
character that we face these Herculean tasks on a daily
basis, and it’s incredible that we carry on, unbowed
and undefeated, if not always openly optimistic. This
conference could well have been called “Incredible
Industrial Conservators.”
The diversity of materials we deal with in this field is
no less incredible than the scope. We must deal with
traditional materials like wood, leather, metals, glass
and textiles. But we also must learn to handle the new
materials like polymers that have appeared during
the past fifty years, as we saw in quite a number of
papers. In this case, the real challenge isn’t so much
size as it is complexity and magnitude. Again, what
binds us together is our fortitude and in facing these
immense challenges. And it is precisely this diversity
that makes us strong. Between us, we can handle
almost anything.
Surprisingly, in spite of all this diversity, there is
also incredible commonality in our field. As we saw
in a number of papers, similar materials can and
do emerge in some of the most unexpected places.
Cellulose nitrate is a good example. Most people
wouldn’t think the finish on a 1930s automobile,
a reel of film, a doll and an early sound recording
would have anything in common, yet they were
all made from the same material and they all face
similar forces of deterioration and destruction.
Another example is woven canvas: a painted sheet
of canvas under tension has a lot in common with the
painted fabric stretched over the frame of an early
airplane, and many aircraft textiles were also treated
with flame retardant chemicals. Who would expect a
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