A Very Busy Year for Conservation Services

Conservation’s FY2012 annual report in a tweet.

As anyone in the lab will tell you, I love statistics. I wrote last year about the Conservation Department’s fiscal year 2011 statistics, I thought I would write about fiscal year 2012.

We have seven staff members, one of whom works only on the renovation project; seven students, five of whom worked on the renovation project; and two volunteers.

We repaired or rehoused 20,512 items from the collections last year.

Of that number, over 14,000 were enclosures, over half of these were renovation related.

62% of our output was for Rubenstein Library; 24% for Perkins/Bostock; the remaining work was for our branch libraries.

We also presented two papers at AIC, served on ALA committees, participated in several library committees, gained skills in conserving papyrus and transparent papers, and Jennifer earned her MLIS (yea Jennifer!).

We had an 11% increase in unique visits to Preservation Underground; a 9% increase in overall page views; we passed 400 Facebook followers; have more than 500 images on Flickr; and we helped start the library’s Pinterest account.

Trends We Are Tracking

Exhibit preparation and installation.

We are doing more preparation and conservation work in support of the Exhibits Program. We expect this upward trend to continue as we expand our program as part of Rubenstein Library renovation.

In FY2011 we started separating out stats for work we do to support digitization projects. Last year that total was 656. We expect this workflow to increase as our digitization program expands in the future.

Since fiscal year 2003, we have repaired or rehoused over 132,000 items from the library’s collections. This year we celebrate Conservation’s 10th year of service to the library. It is an honor to work with such an amazing, dedicated and fun group of people. Thanks to everyone in Conservation for their hard work!