Just when I think I’ve seen it all, somebody asks me to “fix” a book soaked in Coke (or chemicals of unknown nature, or urine of unknown animal), wants me to get the audio off a cassette tape caked in mud, or wakes me up in the middle of the night to salvage a skeleton (in a closet nonetheless) from a broken and flooding HVAC pipe. Do you know how weird a wet skeleton feels? I do. And sometimes I find myself wondering, often out loud, do I really want to touch that with my hand?
Objects that are used are occasionally abused and, more often than not, eventually damaged. This disrepair can often be the fault of the object itself (inherent vice) and often manifests in disfunction. However it happens, damage and disrepair become part of the object’s story … its provenance.
These are the stories of one conservator turned (and not entirely voluntarily turned) preservation paperwork maverick and grant-seeking fiend in an academic library, and how she approaches the task of preserving a variety of material formats so they can continue to tell their story. And then a bunch of her other stories.
PS: I’m Holly Robertson, and I’m the lone preservation crusader at the University of Virginia Library. My lawyer would like you to know that of course the views expressed herein are my own and are not the official thoughts or feelings of my employer.
