Mayday. Mayday. You never want to hear that international distress signal. But when you do, you want to have a plan already in place and have experience putting the plan into action. This morning, our Archives and Library staff took part in the MAYDAY initiative begun by the Society of American Archivists and Heritage Preservation […]
We receive donations to our collection like certificates, panorama photographs and broadsides that have been rolled, which are difficult to handle and house. It is best to store these flat so they can be more easily handled and accessed for research. Many papers are made of poor quality paper and are brittle. The curl retained […]
My favorite part of working at IHS is the challenge of conserving objects and stabilizing them so that they can be safely used. This treatment was an opportunity for me to practice a thought process on ethical conservation, color toning, and to pick the brains of my insightful supervisors even more! This pamphlet consists of […]
Conservators mend paper using a variety of techniques depending on the type of paper, media, or artifact that comes across our bench. One material we use frequently in the Indiana Historical Society Conservation Lab is pre-coated repair papers. These are fabricated in-house and are customizable to a specific project or type of paper that we […]
Charles F. Bretzman was a prominent photographer in Indianapolis during the beginning of the 20th century. The Bretzman Photo Company, was operated for nearly 80 years in Indianapolis. Bretzman ran the business with his, his wife, and son, Noble – who later took over the business – and was responsible for capturing images of Indianapolis’ people, […]
Preservation is central to the mission of the IHS year round, but we celebrate it just a little bit more at the end of April every year. Preservation Week is an initiative of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, a division of the American Library Association, which encourages libraries and other institutions to […]
For Indianapolis Colts: The Exhibit, the Conservation department assisted with preparing several textile artifacts for display. The most challenging objects to prepare for the exhibit were the two Colts cheerleader uniforms. The costumes consisted of separate tops and bottoms, which would allow much of the mannequins to be seen, so the mounts needed to be visually […]
The 3-D valentines in the current Love Always exhibition in the Rosemary McKeeLanham Gallery are beautiful and whimsical – and they posed a challenge for the conservators preparing them for display. How to showcase their intricate, 3-dimensional nature in a secure and attractive way? Our goal with any exhibit mounting system is to make sure […]
When five photo albums documenting the activities of the Indianapolis Chapter of the American Red Cross arrived in the conservation lab looking a little worse for wear, conservation staff jumped into triage mode. The albums, with their brittle paper and failing adhesive tapes, were too unstable to be handled by library patrons or to be […]
In preparation for Indiana Impressions: The Art of T.C. Steele, IHS conservators took to the roads of central Indiana to pick up the 43 paintings on loan from our generous donors. We trained to work with books and paper documents, so this was an opportunity to adapt our knowledge of how to care for fragile […]
