Trend toward closing university library conservation labs

Lisa Fox <lisa.fox [at] sos__mo__gov> writes

>Maureen K. Sharp <msharp [at] purdue__edu> writes
>
>>I have been told my supervisor that there may be a trend starting
>>toward closing university library conservation labs as the materials
>>requiring physical treatment dwindle in the age of e-books, digital
>>preservation, etc. ...
>
>I can tell you that the demand and perceived value of our lab's
>services has increased greatly as our agency's drive for
>digitization has grown. Many items in our collection desperately
>need conservation treatment before they can be digitized and put
>online.  ...

This is a disturbing trend.  In years after the passage of Prop 13
here in California pressure was put on museum labs to produce
"profit" by taking in outside work which, of course, reduced staff
time on collections.  The problem then was management vision, or
lack of it. As technology expands we have to respond, and in the 80s
and 90s I encouraged students to move into DNA analysis for
extracting information from museum objects and published several
articles in scientific journals.  However, costs continue to be the
most important factor to most managers, and at local colleges and at
SFSU we have seen in the past 20 years more medical schools sending
their students to do dissection in our anatomy labs.  Recently there
has been discussion from them that the medical students and pre-meds
do not have to actually do dissection only see it done and most
recently there is a virtual program that can be worn (as a visor)
and the student can see the tissues examined in real time as alive
(real living tissue color). Some administrators have commented that
this program could replace the need for anatomy class altogether!
When we had proposals for a new library the first to be set before
the faculty had no open stacks at all only storage.  The staff
revolted and so now we have stacks.  The needs of administrators are
not the same as those of faculty training the next generation of
doctors, engineers, etc.  You have to communicate that to your
colleagues.

One interesting contradiction that has come from my own experience
was when I gave a lecture recently to a group of politicians and
funding agency professionals.  I was talking about the new ebook
readers and contrasted the passive reading they allowed to the
notations of ancient scholars in the margins of vellum texts, or of
Renaissance scientists like Galileo.  Underlining and marginal notes
are important ways scholars thought and wrote in the past and the
book as a physical object provided an interactive experience that
made it a vehicle for writing and invention compared to an ebook.
There are some computer programs that allow one to write on a
screen, but none that allow for violating the integrity of the text
given the copyright limitation and temporary nature of ebooks at
this time.

It does seem to me that conservators can provide a lot of benefit to
an institution than just binding books and making materials
presentable for copying electronically.  We train our conservators
to be capable of analysis and investigation of materials.  This has
a number of potentially useful educational applications beyond the
common ideas of a CSI.

Niccolo Caldararo, Ph.D.
Dept. of Anthropology
San Francisco State University


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 26:11
                 Distributed: Saturday, August 4, 2012
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