Conservation Interns on the Field Book Project

By Anna R. Friedman, Field book Project Conservator

Win Suen and Elizabeth Childs with a cart of Botany Field Notebooks; photo by Anna Friedman

As Nora mentioned in April, the Field Book Project was the recipient of a Save America’s Treasures grant to hire me as a part-time conservator to manage the physical treatment of collections being cataloged as part of the Field Book Project. We’ve been busy since I came on board in May, developing a workflow, and setting up a Preservation Module in the Field Book database.

Four flap wrapper, photo by Elizabeth Childs

Through funds from the Comer Foundation, we were able to bring in our two amazing summer interns, Win Suen from Princeton and Elizabeth Childs from UC Berkeley to aid in field book conservation. Between the three of us, we achieved some pretty incredible milestones, including nearly 100 custom boxes for field notebooks, and the relocation of the Botany Department’s field notebooks to brand new, climate controlled compact shelving in the Main Library of the National Museum of Natural History.

Botany Field books before the move, photo by Nora Lockshin

A custom box is the most cost-effective bit of preservation for any object. It keeps all its pieces and parts together, protects it from light, dust, pollution, water or fire events and buffers it from from changes in humidity and temperature. The downside to a custom box is that the object in its box will take up more shelf space than it did before.  In their old location, the botany field notebooks had outgrown the shelf space allotted to them, and had been split into two physical locations since there were three more shelves of books that there wasn’t space for. The new location for the Botany field notebooks has all of them in one continuous set of shelving and in order again, which makes the collection easier to access. The new stacks will increase the notebooks’ longevity by keeping them under controlled temperature and humidity conditions, as well as increasing the shelf space available to the collection for the items that are going to get custom boxes.

 

Botany field books in their new location, photo by Anna Friedman

In the next few months, I’ll continue rehousing materials into appropriate storage and making notes in the database for what conservation treatments are necessary on the items. We will have interns again next summer, and they’ll work their way through the queue, just like Win and Elizabeth did!

 

Comments

[LynnBFriedman]

Anna -
Lovely to see the books in their boxes - safe and ready for research in future generations. Keep up the good work! Enjoy those interns!
mom

[Joe@aol.com]

I love this blog!

[Kierra]

Oh, Just lovely to see that you guys have access to such wonderful collection of great books. Please suggest some good books for me.