Volume 21, Number 8
1997

People

• Helen Diana Burgess, paper conservation scientist for the Canadian Conservation Institute since 1978, retired in January 1998, after several years of medical leave. She was a leading researcher and expert on the effects of conservation treatments on paper: cellulose degradation analysis, conservation bleaching, washing, enzyme applications on paper, and aqueous and mass deacidification. Her handbook, "Practical Considerations for Conservation Bleaching," is widely used. She will be missed by many admirers and colleagues in the United States, as well as in Canada.
• Neil Cockerline, after ten years at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has left the conservation field to join the circus. He is Assistant General Manager Controller of Circus Chimera.
• Marc Esser has been the Book Conservator for Rare Books and Special Collections for almost four years at the John J. Burns Library at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. His e-mail address is esser@bc.edu.
• Robert Feller, now retired from his position as Director of the Center on the Materials of the Artist and the Conservator in Pittsburgh, has been made an Honorary Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation. He graduated from Dartmouth College as a chemistry major, but "took almost all of the art courses they had." His Ph.D. was in organic chemistry at Rutgers. He began work at the Center in 1950, and it was the only job he ever had, not counting the many posts he held in professional organizations (IIC, ICOM, AIC). He liked to talk to conservators and watch them at work in the conservation studio. Joyce Hill Stoner wrote the announcement of his retirement and supplied biographical information in the IIC Bulletin for April 1998.
• Françoise Flieder, founder and director of the Centre de Recherches sur la Conservation des Documents Graphiques (CRCDG) in Paris, retired in 1997. She has been appointed Researcher Emeritus and will no doubt spend some of her retirement bringing to completion her research projects, according to the March 1998 CCI Newsletter, which reported her retirement. She was made an Honorary member of the ICOM Committee for Conservation at its 11th Triennial Meeting in Edinburgh.
• Dorothy Frye has been named Preservation Archivist for the Michigan State University Libraries. Before beginning her new appointment in 1997, she served for 11 years as Reference Archivist and preservation officer for the University Archives and Historical Collections at MSU.
• Robert Organ, now retired from the Conservation Lab of the Smithsonian, is at Netherlea Cottage, Ileene Road, Tarbert, Argyll, Scotland, PA29 6TU, UK.
• Jan Paris, library conservator at the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a new fellow of the AIC. Like many who have distinguished themselves in conservation and preservation, she was a practicing bookbinder before she sought formal training, first through library conservation internships in Dublin, Paris and Washington, DC (the Folger Shakespeare Library) and then in the conservation program at Columbia University in 1988. She interned at the Library of Congress under Tom Albro.
• David H. Stam retires this summer after 12 years as University Librarian at Syracuse University, and a long career as librarian and administrator active in preservation. He was the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries at the New York Public Library, 1978-86; and [Head] Librarian at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University, 1973-78. He chaired the Preservation of Library Materials Committee in ARL, 1976-82, and the New York State Advisory Council on Conservation and Preservation of Library Materials, 1985-88; and he consulted on National Preservation Planning at the British Library Research and Development Office. His son Julian is the Preservation Review Librarian at the Widener Library, Harvard University.
• Sarah Stauderman is an archives preservation fellow at the Smithsonian Center for Materials Research and Education (formerly CAL). Her job is to help archives and research collections in Smithsonian buildings with sound preservation practices, using guidelines developed by Senior Paper Conservator Dianne van der Reyden.
• Joan Warnow-Blewett, a leading advocate of preservation for the records of science, retired on August 1, 1997, from her position as associate director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. She is the author of Appraising the Records of Modern Science and Technology: A Guide (MIT, 1985), which is still available from SAA. Immediately after her retirement last August, she was rehired by AIP part-time as archivist emeritus, and continues as project director of the grant-funded AIP Study of Multi-Institutional Collaborations. (Her husband is the eminent accelerator physicist John Blewett.)
• Harold Williams, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust from 1981 until his retirement in January 1998, received the AIC's highest award, the Forbes Medal, in recognition of his leadership in the arts and humanities, and his sustained commitment to and support of the field of conservation.

Death Notices

• Elizabeth Kner, a distinguished bookbinder, died March 2 of this year at the age of 100. She came to the United States from Hungary in 1949, and worked in the rare book collection at the Newberry Library until 1953, when she opened her own bindery. In 1973 Bill Anthony became her partner in Kner & Anthony. An obituary will appear in the June Guild of Book Workers Newsletter.
• Margery S. Long, audiovisual curator of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, died December 19, 1997. She had been a teacher and promoter of preservation, visual materials, sound recordings, and archival exhibitions--all areas then neglected among archivists. She co-authored "Archives and Manuscripts: Administration of Photographic Collections;" taught a graduate-level course, "Conservation and Administration of Photograph Collections;" and offered workshops under SAA. She was one of the first subscribers to the Abbey Newsletter in the 1970s.