The Philadelphia Record news clippings morgue

About 90% of materials that will be included in the Greenfield digital project on the Bankers Trust Company of Philadelphia come from the Albert M. Greenfield Papers (collection 1959). The other 10% include items from other collections here at HSP that also provide information about the bank. One such collection that Dana and I have [...]

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HSP Civic Engagement Collections: A new NHPRC-funded project

This month HSP begins a new 26-month project to process and conserve fourteen collections related to civic engagement in Philadelphia and beyond. Willhem Echevarría has already started work as project archivist, and in December he will be joined by Leah Mackin as project preservation technician. Previously, both Willhem and Leah worked on our Chew papers [...]

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Leather Conservation Workshop with Don Rash

Last month, the Conservation Department welcomed Don Rash for a leather conservation workshop.  Rash is an esteemed fine binder and book artist who works out of Wyoming, PA. Many of the library’s collections contain leather-bound volumes in various states of disrepair.  Some common examples are loose or detached covers and spines and red rot. Over [...]

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What’s in the box?

Just a typical document box? Not so! From the Wister Family Papers, this box contained journals and record books belonging to Sarah Butler Wister from the late 1800s. Each volume received a custom-made enclosure using acid-free corrugated board or library board.

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Before & After: 1807 Land Agreement from the Louis H. Carpenter Collection

When the Conservation Department received this 1807 land agreement from the Louis H. Carpenter Collection, it looked like this: The pages were practically impossible to handle without furthering tears and crumbling the fragile edges. After removing the silk ribbon and unbinding the sewing, I dry-cleaned each page carefully.  Then, I placed the covers and pages [...]

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Getting lost in the details…

For the past month, I have been working with maps from the General George Meade collection. Four large, flat Hollinger boxes contained hundreds of maps and large documents that range in date from the early 1830s through the Civil War.  The maps require individual treatment and I have enjoyed being able to soak in the [...]

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General Meade’s Correspondence Books

One of the larger collections in the DCA Project is the Meade collection.  The collection contains a number of volumes, nearly twenty of  which are the General’s  correspondence books dated from the early 1860s through the late 1860s.  The books are all of the same make and appear to be all the same state of [...]

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HSP’s Adopt-a-Collection Program

This past Friday I gave a presentation in Jersey City about HSP’s Adopt-a-Collection program, which allows people to donate money earmarked for processing and conserving a specific collection. My talk was part of a panel on “creative funding” for archives, at the fall meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC). There were three of [...]

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Memoirs of HSP Printing Proofs

There are few things in conservation work that excite me more than a substantial transformation of an item.  When I pulled out the bundles of dingy paper from an old box, it was exciting to envision them clean, flat and arranged neatly in folders! The three bundles were bound in groups of roughly 100 sheets [...]

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Down the hall, in Conservation…

The Conservation lab has been a hubbub of activity lately with a plethora of projects ranging from the never-ending supply of book repairs and document mending to specialized projects such as the cleaning and repairing of Daguerreotypes. In addition to items from our general collections, the current collections being worked on are the Forrest Home [...]

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