AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

In 2021, Duke University Libraries Conservation Services Department (CSD) received a Lyrasis Catalyst Fund grant to digitize and preserve their legacy conservation treatment documentation. The records spanned seventeen years and were comprised of paper forms, 35mm color slides, photographic prints and born digital documentation. Grant funds were used to hire a student assistant, intern, and vendors to digitize the slides and paper documents. Conservation staff and students created enhanced descriptive metadata for each conservation treatment, including high-level descriptions of the treatment event; format, material, and cultural descriptions of items treated; as well as specific condition and treatment information. 1400 treatment records were ingested into the Duke Digital Repository for preservation, and the collection became public in the summer of 2023. Each item in the archive is linked to the library catalog record for the item treated, and a local note in the catalog directs researchers to documentation for that item in the archive. The CSD plans to add to the collection on an annual basis.

The metadata in the collection are keyword searchable and a subset of fields allow for faceted browsing. The author will discuss the department’s approach to choosing standardized vocabulary for the collection. One of the great offshoots of this project was that it allowed CSD to think more critically about the terms used in their documentation and how previous forms revealed problematic blind spots in staff’s knowledge of bookbinding history. The project prompted an audit of treatment forms to make them more inclusive and accurate for collection materials from a diverse array of cultural traditions.

In many ways, this was a pandemic-era project, and there was a need to manage the endeavor through changing work environments (from working in lab spaces to working remotely, and from analog to digital documentation). With very few peer collections available, the resulting Conservation Documentation Archive (CDA) presents one approach for preserving conservation treatment records and making them available to the public. This model may be useful to consider for institutions planning a similar move from analog to born-digital recordkeeping, and for institutions hoping to shift towards better preservation of their records and increased transparency of their conservation treatment practices. Lessons learned about privacy concerns and other surprises encountered during the project will also be shared.