Hello / Salut RASI scholars,
I'd like to introduce myself and my fellow colleagues with the
Conservation Division of CSTMC. I am Erin, and I will be working with
David, Michel and you throughout next week. The Institute will be held
in our workspace, where myself, Sue, Tony, Kevin, Patricia, Serge and
Dave E conserve artifacts from the collection. You don't need to know
everyone's name - but please feel free to ask us questions.
We are delighted to see such thoughtful discussions generated through
the readings, from participants spanning rather remarkable distances
and fields.
Part of our contribution to the Institute is to give you some tools to
care for your own artifacts and sensitive resources. While we wish we
could spend the whole week discussing book-binding, paint
consolidation, padded foam supports, alloy identification and storage
best practices, David has wisely held us back so you can spend most of
your time with the artifacts. We will have a morning session on
Wednesday where we will talk about cataloguing strategies,
conservation case studies, the role of disposable materials in our
collection and give examples of preservation actions you can take to
preserve your own material. There will be tour of the top-notch
Canadian Conservation Institute where Elisabeth Joy will highlight the
conservation resources and expertise available to researchers such as
you.
A great - but not at all assigned - reading list for preservation
issues are the CCI notes available
http://www.cci-icc.gc.ca/crc/notes/index-eng.aspx
. I do hope that you think about the preservation and stability issues
of your collection - whether it be sorting out a huge pile of
informative correspondence, a leaky basement storage space, broken
bits or sticky photo albums. You can send me an email with your
concern at
ese...@technomuses.ca with specific questions, or bring
them up during the week. If we don't have a good answer for you, we
can help you find someone who will have one.
I suggest that you follow our Twitter feed, @SciTechPreserv for a
good example of what we do here in the lab.
See you next week,
Erin Secord
Conservator
Canada Science and Technology Museum Corporation
613-991-3061
ESe...@technomuses.ca