Collections Care Projects
Collections Care Projects
Mylar Wrappers for Books
The first EPB Collections Care project we embarked upon was creating mylar wrappers for the Early Printed Books in January 2020.
With training from Stefania, the Collections Assistants, Emily Lansell and Miles Deverson proceeded to measure and cut mylar wrappers that would hold the parts of the book in place allowing it to be handled and read more easily.
Adding mylar wrappers rather than simply gluing materials together also has the added benefit that it doesn’t cover any waste material that might be revealed by covers and spines coming loose.
The pandemic brought this project to a premature end in March 2020.
We added mylar wrappers to the following books:
EPB/A/14097
EPB/A/28444
EPB/A/32967
EPB/A/41251
EPB/A/47998
Gluing Boards back onto Early Printed Books
Having conceived changing between EPB and Visual Materials on a quarterly basis, in September 2021 the two Collections Assistants (Miles Deverson and Gemma Organ) looked to move away from re-boxing solander materials to a new EPB orientated project. In discussion with Stefania several projects were considered such as measuring up books for boxing. We eventually landed on using Japanese paper and conservation glue to re-attached boards which had come away from EPBs
We produced an export of EPB/As with a singular detaching or detached board as smaller books with only one board to attach would be easier for us as beginners to re-attach. When we took this export down to the shelves to locate the book we further filtered for books which did not have writing or much colour or patterns on the board or inside page so that the Japanese paper did not cover over any of this.
Schedule clashes followed by a return to work from home delayed this work considerably at the end of 2021.
Fragment Reconciliation
Reconciling book boards proved an even harder challenge than reconciling spines due to the lack of titles on them. However, the Collections Assistants wrote a report of how the inventory’s condition ratings and transcription records could whittle down the list of potential matches considerably.
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