The British Library Conservation center was pretty
interesting – it is located in its own building directly behind the main
building for the British Library, and if you didn’t see the signs pointing to
where it is, you wouldn’t know it was there. The centre itself isn’t generally
open to the public, it seemed like tours and employees only, but there was a
small exhibit in the lobby about conservation.
The Conservation Centre works on more than just books: the
library has hundreds of books of textiles, textiles that are not part of books,
paintings, and much more. The first conservator we talked to was working on
thousand year old paper manuscripts that were found in caves. For some
projects, it’s taken decades for them to be preserved, simply due to
limitations in technology.
Next, we were given a demonstration of book binding, and
told about difficulties caused by certain types of binding. Many more modern
books, including almost all paperbacks, are not as stable and are more likely
to fall apart. We were also given the chance to try our hand at binding an
example book. I wanted to take a shot at it, but I have a tendency to prick my
fingers every time I hold a sewing needle, and I didn’t want to do that in
front of all my classmates! The goal for the books that need to be re-bound is
for them to be done in the original binding style.
Our next stop was textile conservation. The artefact being
worked on here was a flag from the Royal East India Company Volunteers that was
in pretty bad condition. When in use, they’d been around open fires, so a
special bath had to be used to wash the flags. We were told how the flag had
been conserved so far, and the next steps that would be done.
Finally, we were shown part of the Hebrew collections that
are being digitized, and the preservation that the items are undergoing before
being digitized.
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