There’s a new face in the Lab these days. Ashleigh Schieszer (pronounced She-zer), our new Conservator and Lab Manager, arrived last week. She hit the ground running just a few days after moving to Cincinnati from Los Angeles, California where she was completing her internship at the Huntington Library. Somehow, though, in the midst of the orientation sessions, getting to know her way around the Lab and meetings with managers and colleagues she found time to sit down for an interview with me.
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Author Archives: Holly Prochaska, Head Preservation Services and Lab
Hand painted historical renderings
Many times we receive a project and when we tackle it, it turns out to be a multifaceted endeavor. These paintings turned out to be one of those cases.
Created in the Laboratory (aka It's Alive!!!) – a new type of enclosure
A little math problem for you :
Disaster Recovery in your pocket!
At the end of July the State Library of Ohio, with the support of IMLS, organized a two day workshop called Preservation Boot Camp. The workshop covered a myriad of preservation topics – conservation, reformatting, storage and handling, renovation, disaster recovery, and many more. While I took away a ton of ideas from the two day experience, and met dozens of colleagues that I hope to work with in the future, there was one particular tip and trick I just couldn’t wait to institute at our lab ASAP — the Pocket Response Plan (PReP) http://www.statearchivists.org/prepare/framework/prep.htm.
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A Room with a View
“You have a window!”
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How to make a book
Making a blank book can be a lot of fun and it’s fairly easy to do if you have the right equipment. A blank book can be almost any size, shape and color that you want it to be. It can be used as a sketchbook, diary, photo album or just about anything you can think of. The type of book I am making is called a quarter binding because approximately one quarter of the cover is cloth while the rest of the cover is paper.
Changes in Best Practices
One of the best parts of the formation of our joint lab was the addition of a full time conservator. The University of Cincinnati lab had been performing a variety of conservation repairs or mends on general collection items for years. Tip-ins, tears, tape removal, sewing and spine repairs were all familiar types of mending to those of us who had been working in the existing UC lab. But when our joint lab began and our new conservator, Kathy Lechuga, started we quickly began to see that not all our repairs or mends were up to par. Kathy had a vast knowledge of conservation, including best practices that were more up-to-date. Even straight forward repairs like spine repairs (or re-backs) that haven’t changed much in the last 30 years needed some minor tweaking. But one repair stuck out as needing a major update, a paper hinge repair we had been doing for years and years.
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A Weighty Issue
One of the trickiest things about making a cloth-covered clamshell box happens at the very end when all the pieces finally go together. You’re applying a fair amount of adhesive to a fairly large surface area and the moisture in it inspires the boards of the case and the trays to want to curve. To suppress this natural tendency and make sure the pieces stick together properly we have to use a lot of weights.
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Bring your talent with you.
What I love about the human race is we can have very similar characteristics or some really, really different ones. Like all the different colors out there or all the different smells, we all have something unique to bring to the table. I am happy to say here at our lab we are sure a mixed bunch of characters.
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Portfolios – let's jazz 'em up!
This past week the preservation lab hosted 3 classes with 3rd year fashion design majors.
The goal of the sessions were to familiarize the students with the basic parts of the book, explore different types of enclosures, and demonstrate how these simple structures can be “tweaked” to produce a wide range of compelling forms.
Veronica discusses a bound items with exposed sewing.
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