Our student assistants and volunteers are a dedicated, hardworking group of individuals and they are invaluable to the Lab. They are constantly learning new treatments, expanding their preservation knowledge, and helping our Lab move forward and treat general collection items. For the students, this means they do all this while going to school full-time at the University of Cincinnati. So, every year we like to pick a day or two around the holidays to celebrate our students and volunteers and say “thank you” by treating them to a little bit of preservation-related fun. We appropriately call these our “student/volunteer fun days”.
We always pick an activity that will be enjoyable for the students/volunteers, but also benefit the Lab in some way. In the past this has included paste paper and paper marbling. For both we asked everyone to donate a portion of their papers to the Lab for our supply. This year for “fun day” we decided to demonstrate and create a selection of book structures with the idea that the people could expand their conservation skills and learn new techniques, and afterward the Lab would have a selection of models of the various structures.
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Tag Archives: Jessica Ebert
Created in the Laboratory (aka It's Alive!!!) – a new type of enclosure
A little math problem for you :
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 massive and impressive contraption
One of the (many) great things about our collaboration, and the State Library of Ohio grant that funded our collaborative lab, was being able to purchase new equipment and supplies. With grant funds, the lab purchased an additional board shear, a humidification/suction table, a ductless fume-hood, additional map cases to store paper and many other wonderful things. But there were certain unique and very specific items that we couldn’t find through outside vendor s, and that’s when UC’s talented group of carpenters came to our aid. The UC carpenters were essential when it came to renovating our existing lab, adding a second bench area for the conservator and two conservation technicians, and a second sink by the new work benches. But one of the most massive and impressive contraptions they constructed was multi-compartment structure to hold binders board, corrugated board, foam, and other various odds and ends. It’s mammoth, sturdy and expertly crafted. And more importantly offers an excellent storage solution to some of the new supplies we were ordering.
Yet, after the first year of our new created collaborative lab there was still one area where we still need some organization help…bookcloth and buckram storage. For ages we had been storing our bookcloth and buckram in an oversized laminate bin.
Imagine this but jammed full of three times the cloth and buckram.
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