Twenty years ago, you might have found Debora Mayer at her worktable in Harvard’s campus center, bent over a fragile 17th-century drawing. She would be carefully marking a photocopy of the drawing, recording each place the original document had been repaired, and eventually moving on to the next item in a steady rhythm of independent work.

Mayer, who is now the Helen H. Glaser Senior Paper Conservator at the Weissman Preservation Center, works a bit differently today. She prepares collections for treatment using high-resolution, digitally scanned images, which are then entered into a database to preserve records of how and when items were treated.

Continue reading about the 20th Anniversary of the Weissman Preservation Center.