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a brief description of ALL the items listed below - or click on any individual item for its own description. |
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RESTORATION AND ARCHIVAL WORK
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Is this just a nice piece of old embroidery?
Or is it much more than that?
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In doing archival work, an archivist sometimes deals with documents or artifacts which, over time, have become
soiled and/or damaged. Dirt and damage can easily occur when documents or artifacts are kept out in the open or
are handled too often. Even normal environmental factors like air quality, temperature and humidity, UV-A and UV-B
rays in sunlight and florescent lighting, all take a toll on the condition of important records and historical
pieces. This is why museums and archives try to control these factors as much as possible by restricting the amount
of touch and exposure of all materials, and also by controlling the temperature, humidity, and light in the buildings.
When something of importance has suffered damage, the question of "restoration" enters in -- what can
be done to make the artifact last much longer and slow down any further damage?
One of the older documents in our Salvatorian Archives -- the appointment of
Father Epiphanius Diebele SDS by our founder, Father
Francis Jordan, as the first Superior of the community in St. Nazianz, Wisconsin -- had probably been
handled too often or too roughly in its earlier days. The right side of the document, and in particular the bottom-right
corner, had suffered damage and looked pretty "dog-earred." We applied a piece of acid-free archival-quality
restoration paper to that corner, so that it wouldn't suffer any further damage.
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This type of restoration is common among archivists. The intention is solely about the future safety of the document.
There isn't any concern to make it look "perfectly original." |
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The bottom-right corner of the document
repaired with archival restoration backing paper.
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