fasciculing

Trust trainees to do a good job

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

This week, I have been fortunate to work with Poppy Garrett, one of the museum trainees at The Wordsworth Trust.

Poppy came to my studio to learn about handling and cleaning methods in preparation for working with me on the conservation and fasciculing of a large and significant Wordsworth Trust archive collection. The items we were working with during the training were very generously provided by the archive of The Salters’ Company who were pleased to have Poppy and myself treating a collection that otherwise may have not be cleaned in this year’s conservation schedule.

The collection in question was a box of petitions for assistance, dating from 1805. These documents detail the requests for financial help received by the Salters’, mainly due to hardship and unemployment. As you can see, they made good subjects for cleaning training, with plenty of historical storage surface dirt for Poppy to tackle.

 

 

 

 

We started with making a dusting box, an essential piece of kit to control the spread of eraser crumbs and dirt, moved through to cleaning with a latex sponge, brush and vinyl eraser, including grated eraser, and finished with a couple of simple and straightforward tear repairs. We also managed to fit in a quick tutorial on the best way to adhere bookplates, something that Poppy was going to be doing in the coming week.

 

 

 

 

It was great to work with Poppy, who picked up the techniques really quickly and had a good awareness of how to handle and support these often fragile and damaged items during the cleaning process.

My thanks to the The Wordsworth Trust and to The Salters’ Company for supporting Poppy’s training with me. We have an excellent collections care professional in the making!

Pick a number, 1 to 8

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

The fasciculing of a selection of manuscript material at The Wordsworth Trust was completed with an enjoyable tooling session, putting the finishing touches to this part of an ongoing rehousing project.

 

 

 

 

Fasciculing is a effective means of storing primarily single sheet  or bifolia material, such as correspondence collections, with the maximum support and security whilst minimising handing of the original object.  Fascicules are slim pamphlet bindings constructed like a guard book, with compensation guards to allow for the bulk of the inserted material. The individual items are hinged onto to the support sheets with a Japanese paper guard tipped very narrowly onto the verso, allowing a wide border around each item for turning  the pages. These hinges can easily be removed and replaced should the item be required for display purposes. The individual fascicules can then be stored in boxes, keeping the items inside flat, secure and dust-free.

The image shows me tooling the reference number onto the fascicule covers so that the correct volume can be retrieved from each box as and when it is required for research, again to minimise the handling of the collection.

 

As always, permission has been sought for the inclusion of these images.