by Christopher Sokolowski, paper conservator at the Weissman Preservation Center

Like in-person events everywhere last year, Harvard’s preservation community came together in 2020 to learn—and laugh—on Zoom. The annual Caring for Collections speaker’s event modified its format to three online live sessions this past fall, giving staff a view of preservation activities happening across the campus, as well as some needed social time. “The internet makes it easy to look at what’s going on somewhere else,” said moderator Christopher Sokolowski, a paper conservator at the Weissman Preservation Center, “but this event is a showcase for the expert work of our Harvard colleagues.”  

The first session in September featured two presentations about making collections more visible to users. The first, given by Jasmine Malone, a summer intern with Preservation Services of the Harvard Library, focused on the users themselves by showing how students can be empowered to promote the relevance of archival collections to their peers. 

Jasmine Malone.

Laura Lacombe followed with an overview of her work in Honduras mapping the buried buildings of a Mayan site in Copan while working as an architectural conservator for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.  

Laura Lacombe. Photo credit: Karina Garcia.

October brought another pair of presentations, this time about seemingly singular objects now in Harvard collections that were originally conceived as multiples. Oa Sjoblom, a book conservation intern at the Weissman Preservation Center, showed her research into other copies of Simon Pokagon's printed birch-bark booklets about the destruction of Native American culture as she considered treatment approaches for those from the Houghton Library. 

Oa Sjoblom reparing birch bark pages. 

Across Quincy Street, the Harvard Art Museums recently discovered that its 1605 oil portrait of King Philip III of Spain has siblings. Paintings conservator Cristina Morilla, of the Straus Center for Conservation explained how technical imaging has allowed her and others to link the Harvard portrait to three other versions and suggest they were all painted simultaneously, offering a variation on the common model of original and copy.  

Cristina Morilla.

The final session in December demonstrated that collaboration with colleagues yields better results, whether eradicating hungry moths or studying an illustrated Persian manuscript. Pests in collections can be a threat, and an outbreak in one storage room brought conservators Cassy Cutulle and Morgan Nau together at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology to minimize damage and prevent similar episodes for the future. They also shared strategies for monitoring pest activity during our present moment of building closures. 

 

Cassy Cutulle (L) and Morgan Nau (R) . Copyright President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

The second presentation demonstrated a coordinated approach as well, in this case by paper conservator Penley Knipe of the Straus Center for Conservation and book conservator Katherine Beaty of the Weissman Preservation Center. Working together, they saw the failing binding of the 15th-century Baysunghur Anthology as an opportunity to separate the leaves for technical study and exhibition. In the end, the manuscript was reassembled into its book format and was returned to Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence along with a far richer object file informing essays in a forthcoming publication on the Persian and Islamic objects collected by Bernard Berenson. 

 

 

Penley Knipe near Villa I Tatti in Florence (L) and Katherine Beaty examining the 15th-century Baysunghur Anthology (R).

It turned out that the Zoom version of Caring for Collections effectively simulated past events, even down to the size of the audience which averaged 65. Behind the scenes, Priscilla Anderson and Jorge Rodriguez of Preservation Services made the event happen and both are ready to do it again for 2021!