by Erin Hammeke, Senior Conservator
We’re very excited to announce that a new batch of conservation records has just been made publicly available in the CDA! With the addition of this batch, we have a total of 1,788 records preserved in the collection to date. The latest group of records date from 2017 through 2020. To view them, you can browse the CDA collection and then sort by date (New to Old).
Encompassed in these years is documentation for work performed on the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection exhibition and loan, which was a huge project for us in Conservation and in Rubenstein Library during this time. The collection focuses on women at work, and the conservation documentation includes such highlights as a photographic portrait of Sojourner Truth, Henry’s beautiful treatment of this blue paste paper binding, and Rachel’s transformative stain reduction to the ceramic Anti-Slavery Dessert Service.
Other highlights include repair to an early edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, flattening of a patent issued by Queen Victoria, and repair to this sweet children’s book from the 1930s.
It really takes a team of people to ensure these records are ingested, described, and displaying correctly. Thank you so much to the staff from Conservation Services, Repository Services, Rubenstein Library Collection Development, Technical Services, and Digital Collections for their skillful work on and dedication to this ongoing project.