Collections Care
A summary of projects run alongside inventory
Helping to ensure the long-term preservation of the museum accreditation materials has always been a core aspect of the inventory. Alongside our day to day contributions (such as re-housing individual items and assigning condition ratings), we have also set time aside to work on self-contained projects.
The two Collections Assistants have now long been in the routine of setting aside either one morning a week or one whole day a fortnight to work on these specific conservation tasks. Like everything else they do, this has been split between working on Visual Material and Early Printed Books work.
Postcards
Origin of the Project
The postcard project appears to have formulated in 2016 and thus pre-dates the inventory. The collection is huge and eclectic, estimating around 9500 postcards, and covering every conceivable subject. Very few of them are catalogued.
It seems to have been passed between various interns and student placements before Anna Hoffman handed it over to the Collections Assistants, not long after the start of the inventory in April 2019.
The postcards had been stored in a large wooden cabinet without any dividers. This meant that they were touching acidic surfaces on all sides and had accumulated dust and dirt, particularly along the top, over the years.
Our Work
We worked through the postcards using a smoke sponge to clean them. We then placed them in a conservation grade plastic wallet inside of a ring binder. As the postcards were divided into different subjects in the wooden drawers, we included dividers for these subjects within the ring binder.
We took additional care to identify if postcards were photographs and had a shiny surface (rather than matte prints), so we could use the lighter brush and not damage the objects with the courser surface of the smoke sponge.
The Collections Assistants also worked on flattening some of the postcards which had become curved and out of shape over time. These postcards, which were photographs of early 20th Century Iraq, were placed in the humidification chamber to soften them up before being placed between absorbent sheets and held under weights to flatten them out.
There were several additional items in the collection, which were too large to fit in the pockets of the plastic wallets and will require further housing assistance in the future.
Outcomes
Many of the postcards were discovered to have writing on them, including some from Henry Wellcome to his son, Mounteney. There are about half a dozen of them appearing to date from his trip to Egypt and Sudan in the winter of 1910/11, as well as his subsequent trip to Switzerland in the summer.
Collections Assistant, Miles Deverson, delivered a CatChat on the inventory collection on 9th December 2020, where he covered Wellcome’s handwritten postcards, the Franzen Faces of Basel and Malvina Hoffman’s The Races of Mankind exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
The project is ongoing.
Re-Boxing in the Solander Store
The Visual Materials in the solander store are housed in a variety of boxes, some dating back decades. These boxes are composed of a range of materials, including cardboard, wood and black buckram, but only a minority are made with modern acid-free conservation quality material.
These older boxes presented several challenges both to the collection and to those who work with it. Many of the boxes were acidic and thus detrimental to the long-term preservation of the materials they held. The older boxes were also smaller than the new acid free ones, which led to many of the larger prints becoming cramped and at danger of creasing. Furthermore, many boxes were quite heavy or disintegrating over time, which posed difficulties to retrieval and inventory staff who would have to handle them.
We decided to prioritise areas which contained cardboard and wooden solander boxes, due to the acidic nature of the boxes and their greater state of deterioration. Miles and Gemma created a list of all the cardboard and wooden solander boxes and have been systematically moving objects to new acid-free boxes. The next phase of re-boxing will focus specifically on S44 and S45, as the boxes have been too small for us to adequately rehouse many of the photographic items within acid free folders. Furthermore, the Fallaize Collection, which has been prioritised for cataloguing, is located in this area.
As part of this work, the Collections Assistants also print off and apply new location and subject labels to the boxes, as well as including details of former locations. We decide upon the subject label by comparing and combining: what was written on the box (while seeking to preserve this information before it was disposed of), what was written on the subject lists for each row in the solander store and a quick assessment of what the box actually contained.
As of January 2021, we have re-housed 105 solander locations.
The vast majority of wooden and cardboard solander boxes are being disposed of as they are in such poor condition. The black buckram boxes are in good condition and could still be useful so will be offered to students and museums who might make use of them.
After discussions with William Schupbach about the history of the collection, it was decided that in order to preserve the “materiality” of the collection’s history we would keep a selection of old solander boxes, which were representative of the different solander boxes used over time.
Their inventory numbers are:
INV.2020/1328
INV.2020/1329
INV.2020/1330
INV.2020/1332
INV.2020/1331
INV.2020/1333
Brass Rubbings
Our Process
We first came across the brass rubbings when we were finishing inventory work in the Plan Chest store. When we found them, they were not all in suitable housing or condition. There were bundles of several brass rubbings tightly rolled round each other, and a thick layer of dirt was visible upon them.
We showed them to the Conservation Department who explained that the best way to store them was to lie them flat. As these brass rubbings had possibly spent decades rolled up, the fibres of the paper and card had become fixed into position. In order to prevent the material from cracking, the brass rubbings would therefore need to be placed in a humidified environment to loosen up the fibres and then then become slowly flattened over time.
Prior to the brass rubbings being humidified, the Collections Assistants would need to clean them, as the dirt sitting on top of the paper would otherwise irreparably sink into the fibres and permanently stain the objects. Originally, we tried to clean the brass rubbings in the Conservation Studio, but they were so dirty that unrolling them caused dust and dirt to go everywhere and made us cough and splutter. Conservation allowed us use of the Bassaire, which is a workstation on a stainless-steel grate which continually vacuums in disturbed dust and debris, and thereby saves us from continually breathing in these remnants of Victorian smog that the papers are covered in.
Every Thursday, we dressed in PPE to protect our clothes and our lungs and used a conservation vacuum with a soft brush attached to clean the material, after which we went over it again with a conservation smoke sponge to remove the more firmly attached dust. This was a quite therapeutic project to work on and it was very satisfying to watch the beautiful brass rubbings emerge from all the grot they had been covered in for so long.
We then re-housed them, reducing the number of brass rubbings in each roll and interleaving them with acid-free tissue meaning they will be better preserved for the future. While we did this, we also processed them for our inventory by assigning each brass rubbing a temporary INV number on QuickBase. This provided the objects with a minimum viable record by Spectrum standards, which included: a new location, brief description or lettering, a date for the brass and the rubbing, a condition rating and damage type.
Outcomes
We’ve created a folder on Sharepoint where we’ve uploaded an Excel export of our brass rubbing QuickBase data, along with images of each brass rubbing and all our research, so that future cataloguers and everyone in the department can access what we’ve found.
Miles Deverson and Sara Masinelli presented a CatChat on the project on the 15th November 2019. Sara followed this up with a TrustNet post in February 2020.
Future Work
Despite the progress we made on the brass rubbings project, there still remains more to be done. While we removed the worst of the dust and dirt with the vacuums, this was just the loosest dust on top of the brass rubbings. Before they could be humidified and flattened, the rest of the dirt would have to be removed using smoke sponges, which would be a major undertaking in itself. Furthermore, once the brass rubbings have been flattened by conservation, suitable housing and storage will need to be found for these rather large items.
Finally, the vast majority of the brass rubbings remain uncatalogued (and undigitised) and therefore are unknown and unavailable to researchers and the public. It would make sense to at some point collaborate with the Monumental Brass Society (https://www.mbs-brasses.co.uk/) to utilise their expertise, and promote these fascinating items to those who could most benefit from studying them.
Other institutions with large collections of brass rubbings that we could liaise with include the Malcolm Norris Centre at the University of Birmingham, the Society of Antiquaries, the Ashmolean Library, the British Library and the V&A.
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