The American Institute for Conservation

Notes from the Compiler

Volume 19 of the Book and Paper Group Annual is dedicated to

Paul N. Banks and Anne F. Clapp

The first of the two Book and Paper Group sessions at the twenty-eighth annual meeting of the American Institute for Conservation in Philadelphia focused on the theme "Conservation in the Global Community." Eight presentations explored book and paper conservation activities, projects, and training outside the United States. The second session provided opportunity for reports and discussion on research, case studies, and ethics.

All twenty-three papers presented at the annual meeting are represented in this volume of the Book and Paper Group Annual. Authors who chose not to submit the full text of their paper for publication in the Annual have graciously consented to republish the abstract of their presentation, frequently revising it to better represent the paper as presented or adding citations to other publications where further information may be found. The addition of the abstracts have made the Annual a more comprehensive representation of the meeting, a point emphasized by the grouping of the meeting papers together in print. Six additional papers were submitted independently by their authors; these document papers or posters presented at the AIC meeting and other presentations or research of special interest to Book and Paper Group members.

In the production of volume 19 I am grateful to the proofreaders: Whitney Baker, Jo Burgess, Heather Caldwell, Liz Dube, Roberta Pilette, Barbara Rhodes, Jane Sugarman, and Douglas Stone. Their discerning eyes have saved me embarrassment on almost every page; the errors that remain are probably due to my failing to heed their advice. The University Library at the University of Michigan has provided technical support, while my colleagues in the Preservation Division have added moral support. The Book and Paper Group Publications Committee has as ever provided guidance and encouragement; their names appear inside the front cover of this volume. Thanks to Walter Henry, seven of the eighteen past volumes of the Annual are now available on the Book and Paper Group web site. The Preservation Center of the Harvard College Library and Bill Comstock from their Digital Imaging and Photography Group have generously provided technical support for scanning volumes 1 to 11; these will become available on the web as the image scans are turned into text by optical character recognition (OCR), proofread, and marked up, and as copyright permissions can be secured from the authors.

In the spring of 2000 we mourned the loss of a book conservator and a paper conservator, two giants in the development of the field in the United States. This volume is dedicated to them.