conservation/preservation

i have been reading about issues in conservation and preservation and didn't know if anyone would like to talk about them with me. it can be very very general or very very specific or somewhere in between. i've mainly been reading about preservation of information, primarily books, but i don't want to limit the discussion

i think preservation is interesting because it's obviously important and something that should be done, but at the same time it's inevitably futile, because there is no way to conserve anything forever. also interesting to me is the concept that typically the best way to preserve something makes that item or information inaccessible (ie locking a reel of film up in cold storage forever), which goes against the purpose of the item or information in the first place. i'm interested in discussing the "paradox of preservation": the idea that it is impossible to keep things the same forever; that the acts of conservation, preservation and restoration involve alteration. finally, i'd like to talk about the idea that preservation is a relative concept: that as objects change over time, our ideas or interpretations of those objects also change

(yes these are things i'm reading about for school but i swear i'm not just poaching ideas for papers, i'd just like to talk about these ideas in a more informal environment)

i preserve wildlife in mason jars

if you preserve cheese for a few years, it tastes better when you eat it.

I don't know tons about any of this BUT I work in a university archives and therefore hear about this kind of thing all the time and get to see the conservators doing crazy stuff to old books all the time.

Are you a librarian / archivist / conservator?

i have a lot to say on this issue but the alice waters thread has given me a headache and i need to step outside now.

i am in library school

i don't know a lot about this stuff either, so i just assume that the masters for all my favorite records and movies are being carefully archived.

i'm interested in discussing the "paradox of preservation": the idea that it is impossible to keep things the same forever; that the acts of conservation, preservation and restoration involve alteration. finally, i'd like to talk about the idea that preservation is a relative concept: that as objects change over time, our ideas or interpretations of those objects also change

about five years ago, i borrowed a privacy report written in the 1970's for a patron. we had owned a copy but it had gotten lost. then the patron lost the borrowed copy (LOL.) I looked online to see if I could get a PDF copy at least, but there was nothing. We ended up buying a used copy on alibris for the other library to replace their old one.

I just looked last week and someone's put it up online. back five years ago i probably would have said there's a huge difference between having a book in your hands and having a scanned copy. i'm less sure there's a difference now.

this brings up the difference between having a book on your hard drive and having a book in your hands--i still think having the actual book is better, especially when you need to look at an index, don't know what you're looking for etc

That is what control-F is for, Que.

control F is great but not all docs are OCR-ed and an index is still better when you don't know what term of art you are looking for

well conservation and preservation are focused on the value of the original object. copies/pdfs come into play as a way of preserving the object by reducing usage of the original object, but then you again get into my question of whether it's worth conserving an object if it means not allowing people to access that object

btw i'm using conservation and preservation as synonyms, which apparently is more of a european style. per the class i'm in right now, preservation is defined as the general idea of providing access to materials for as long as possible, while conservation is more technically the series of physical treatments used to slow deterioration and provide for continued access, and restoration is the attempt to return an object to its original condition. apparently also conservation values "reversibility" and restoration doesn't, which i'm still wrapping my head around and i may want to talk about more later

Reversability/distinguishability is an ongoing argument in archeology & all kinds of historic studies, isn't it? There's a school of thought that seems to be winning that favors restoring, for instance, classical temples, with new materials that can be easily distinguished from the old ones, so you can see the total effect but also so the new elements (which may be varying levels of imaginative) can't be confused w the old ones.

i'm going to have to gather my thoughts and reversability and present them to my prof when my head is more together because she's basically already admitted that reversability is often more of an ideal than something actually practiced (like obviously if a book is stained you want to wash out the stain but there's no way to wash something in a way that it can be reversed) but i'm also confused about the philosophy behind reversability.

thanks for bringing up distinguishability, that context certainly helps. though i'm not sure if the philosophy behind that makes any more sense to me.

Well, sometimes the restorations or rebuildings are partly extrapolated from historical descriptions or by starting from a known place and pushing out to what the field of study shows would have been "typical" for that culture or whatever. I'm speaking very generally here but you understand, surely? So the distinguishability advises the viewer that restored elements should be viewed with some suspicion.

When it's just a missing column drum, you can be pretty sure the column didn't look drastically different in the missing piece, but if it's a whole frieze or a roof-line or extrapolating the colors something was painted, that's a lot more extrapolated.

that makes sense and it's probably a good idea, i guess i'm just a little hesitant about the 'middle ground' between showing something as it exists now (ie without any restoration) and showing something completely restored in an attempt to make it look exactly like it did in the past. using new materials, while allowing for an "out" for incorrect or uncertain interpretations, seems like it would prevent one from presenting a realistic restoration. of course, you're right that these restorations can end up being inaccurate, but there's also something to be said for maintaining these inaccurate restorations to show how interpretations of the past have differed over time. like there's something both charming and educational about dinosaurs "invented" by archeologists incorrectly reassembling skeletons

ps i'm not really sure anymore that distinguishability is comparable to reversibility, at least as i understand the latter, but it's a good parallel conversation. it seems like the point of reversibility is to not physically change the original object, it's not supposed to necessarily mimic the original design/binding/object, i think?

sorry i am literally in my preservation class right now so i'm having trouble articulating things

this is interesting!
i am no librarian and no archivist, but i am into history as a non-static thing - the 'paradox of preservation' is that no matter what we do, the thing will change because it came out of a certain time/place/culture. how or why we keep it is the question - what's the point of certain methods of preservation?

i would say the point is to remind us of our existence and its spiral nature.
to look back at an archive shows us how we (or our ancestors, or the world/environment) saw the world and how we interacted in it, i mean, beyond use value.

maybe what i'm saying is: what's the point of having long-term memories and being able to extend them through archives & technologies? i think it just comes down to identity, something to hold on to while we spin through space pretending to ignore death.

i am having a totally weird day!

this is what i'm in school for as well and i would like to say a lot of things except i have class in 20 mins but KEEP TALKING ILX

ok i will say quickly that as far as format obsolescence and video preservation is concerned, the idea now is "migration" - it's pointless to keep the machines that play obsolete media around forever (there's only about 10 machines in the country that still play 2" quad tape and only one guy alive who knows how to repair the machines in case they break down), so the goal is to move the content onto newer formats that are more archive-friendly. the problem with this is that this process is ongoing and lots of institutions don't really have the funds to do this so they're still stuck using magnetic media that won't last very much longer. digital/hard drives play into a lot of this now but that's its own kettle of fish (we don't know EXACTLY how long info can stay on hard drives, digital formats get obsolete too, hard drives crash, etc)

That's what I mean about the futility of preservation. Maybe we should just celebrate some old things and then let them die instead of constantly restoring and translating them

Not a very librarian attitude but I'm not a librarian yet ;)

i hear that n/a but what if you're talking about say medical records and less about objects of purely aesthetic value?

I was thinking more long-term obv not stuff needed right now

one of the things that kind of blew my mind about Katrina was this aspect of it - the archives of entire courthouses, law firms, hospitals, police stations just blown away

girl in my program wrote her thesis about katrina and disaster prevention for archives

i think precisely because there's been so much anxiety about things getting thrown out or decaying - and subsequent loss of info and thus history - that general current practice is basically "keep everything"

yeah i really hope we discuss how to be smart about choosing what to preserve in this class, seems like that's about as important as preservation methods

i read a little bit about reversibility last night but am still somewhat unsure what it entails myself - which kinds of conservation procedures are "reversible"?

and reversible how? like if a conservator fucks up they can just be like OOPS back to square one with minimal/no damage?

that's what i'm confused about and what i'm going to ask my prof about. i'm not sure if it has a practical basis, like they want to be able to undo a bad conservation job (which seems weird), or if it has a philosophical basis, like they want to maintain the original object as much as possible (which also seems weird). also just from a practical standpoint, i don't really understand how a fully reversible conservation job could actually be productive - if you're using a removable adhesive, for example, it seems like it would probably be weaker and more likely to degrade

My dad is huuugely into historic preservation, mostly of buildings and other industrial revolution-era structures. A lot of the reasoning behind it, I think, has to do with the standard "remembering the past so as not to repeat mistakes" kind of point of view, but also to avoid the destruction of unique examples of building techniques and/or craftsmanship that simply don't exist any more.

"Conservation" to me means more natural-world endeavors.

xposts - record-keeping types of preservation seems one of the areas best served by going digital
as opposed to say, fresco-keeping preservation or panda-keeping conservation...

yeah, most records-keeping institutions are going digital. lots of film repositories too. and i for welcome our new content-on-demand overlords

also i'm a "hip librarian" (or library student): i'm writing a preservation assessment of the punk planet collection at the chicago underground library

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, March 2, 2009 1:56 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^ BRAGGING 2009

my classmate was telling me about that collection not long ago! sounds awesome

this class is making me think seriously about a career in conservation/preservation or at least trying to get the preservation certificate my program offers

seriously awesome article in last week's new yorker about an art conservator who specializes in modern art that uses unusual materials (like tree stumps and elephant dung). unfortunately it's not one of their free articles but it's worth seeking out if you're interested in this kinda junk

would love to do this kind of work but it would probably mean more school or an apprenticeship after finishing my MLS and i don't know if i could handle that

also i'm a "hip librarian" (or library student): i'm writing a preservation assessment of the punk planet collection at the chicago underground library

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, March 2, 2009 1:56 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol my final project for a class last semester was a collection assessment of bootleg punk show cassettes from the 1970s. CRED FITE

ha ha nice

n/a, one of my best friends did her masters in conservation about 2.5yrs ago and hasn't been able to find a steady job since - just a few very short-term contracts. apparently it's a super difficult area to break into.

^^this is pretty much the state of things, yeah. we've more or less all been told to not expect a full-time gig right out of graduating next yr

an awesome article about preservation of digital materials:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html

hah, i get a lot of "but things are going digital now right, so everything's ok!" when i tell people what i'm doing and i always have to be like "ACTUALLY..."

Hello conservation/preservation thread! I am starting my MLS program later this summer and I think I want to focus on archives on either paper conservation or A/V conservation.

LOL at "digitization" making all problems go away. You don't have to deal with obsolescence with books...

Totally thought this thread was going to be about deep ecology vs. public access and integration, etc. and was a little disappointed that it wasn't. BUT after reading some comments I think that most of the issues brought up are interchangeable between the two topics which is pretty interesting.

ok lol boingboing but there's some great photos here:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/09/gallery-digitizing-t.html

tom coburn can eat a dick:

"The No. 1 thing is that it is not a federal responsibility to archive the materials of a rock band," said John Hart, Coburn's director of communications. "If Santa Cruz wants to do that, they can digitize archives of anything they like with their money. The fact is we have a $14 trillion debt, and we are in danger of going into a far deeper recession. There are thousands of grants and projects like this around federal government."

http://www.kentucky.com/2010/12/21/1575092/senator-calls-universitys-digital.html

what a square. seriously though, stuff like this makes me want to scream. i saw the job listing for the director of the archive this summer, hope they got someone awesome.

w/ balls or the female equivalent

lol guess coburn doesn't know that some of that IMLS money went towards funding the preservation and exhibition of gay historical material last summer - not that i'm gonna tell him that

also lol public universities have no pretty much no money whatsoever to do that kind of work unless they seek outside funding sources anyway

Announced on January 20, the Spending Reduction Act of 2011 targets critical funding for national programs that save and protect some of America’s greatest historic and cultural assets.

Introduced by the Republican Study Committee, the act proposes $153 billion in federal spending cuts over five years through nearly 50 types of reductions. Among the programs noted for elimination are Save America’s Treasures, Preserve America, Heritage Areas, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/save-americas-treasures/trouble-for-our-treasures.html

http://www.npr.org/2013/12/29/257881008/to-save-the-black-rhino-hunting-club-bids-on-killing-one

AMPAS (“The Academy”) just laid off 16 people across their library and archives departments, including the director of the archive

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/academy-ampas-layoffs-library-archive-1236196896/

been so bummed about this news since yesterday. especially now that i manage students in MLIS programs and this is the professional world they’re entering into. and this new CEO quoted in the article with his smarmy corp-speak, ughhhhh

also this org has ties to literally every wealthy entertainment industry person and somehow couldn’t cough up enough money to help save these peoples’ jobs?people who in some cases worked there for over two decades??