Hello everyone, my name is Brittany Murphy. I am one of the student workers in the Special Collections Preservation studio, I started working there in spring of last year and this spring I am also acting as an intern. I am getting kind of a late start to blogging this semester seeing as it is almost April already. To rectify this I’m going to summarize what I have been up to over in the studio.
The intended focus of the first few weeks of my internship was creating archival enclosures for a few artifacts in the collection. At the start we had quite a long list of hopeful projects, but extenuating circumstances limited my time considerably. In January, the team had a big project preparing an item for digitization, a 1920’s Spanish newspaper called El Fronterizo. The newspapers were stapled together and then glued into brown paper that acted as a cover. We had to remove the newspaper from it’s binding, some our conservator, Fleur van der Woude, did most of. I tried to do some of the unbinding but ended up doing more harm then good, so I stopped and let the professional step in. We then had to stabilize the newspaper page by page, repairing the tears with tiny pieces of Japanese tissue coated with wheat starch paste. Later in the semester, during spring break we had a group of brilliant middle schoolers come through where Fleur gave a talk on book binding, the presentation included several very intersecting artist books. My job that day was creating the display of books for the presentation, I enjoyed getting creative, especially since many of the book required some interesting techniques because of their designs. One book, called The Desert was created entirely of resin that had cactus spikes protruding from it!
I did managed to complete an enclosure for the shovel from the groundbreaking of Old Main. It is in fairly good shape with the exception of it’s ribbon which is so fragile that is begins coming apart at the slightest touch. For the shovel I created a top loading box lined with protective foam and some acid free paper to support the shovel’s handle to account for the height difference. The final step for all of the these enclosures will be to create and place handling instructions on their boxes.
The next portion of my internship is learning how to do minor book repairs, that is a project that has been moved and extended throughout the semester, simply because it has been difficult to get the whole team together for training, so far we have had two training sessions, the first was spent learning the different parts of a book and how it is constructed/bound. The second session consisted our studio assistant, Elise Ertheim, teaching us how to preform hinge repairs, which consists of coating thin strips of Japanese paper in wheat starch paste, and then laying them across the area where the board is pulling away from the book block. If I did my job right, you should barley be able to see the repair!
The project I am currently working on involves the survey that the studio team has been preforming for about the last year. We have be doing a complete survey of the archives collection, this means going box by box assessing each item for anything that could be detrimental collection, like mold, red rot, pest but also more common things like overstuffed boxes. My project consist of updating the draft report created by our previous intern, Benjamin Peregoy. Since Ben’s stint as an intern we have surveyed hundreds more collections so the data needs to be updated. During this process we have also discovered that our manual for the project needs to be updated to more accurately represent how our process has changed so I will be doing that as well.
That catches me up on what I have been doing for my internship! Hopefully a new post will be coming soon!
Archivist Apprenticeship 