Preservation and Conservation of Book & Paper @ Yale University Library: A Behind the Scenes Laboratory Tour of the Yale Center for British Art and Yale University Library
Yale University’s museums and libraries hold extensive collections of book, bound manuscripts, paper and parchment documents, art on paper, photographs, scrapbooks, ephemera and other paper-based objects. The University has supported collections conservation collections for many years, and conservators and technicians from the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Library will open the doors to their labs for tours and conversation with staff about their spaces – one in continuous use for three decades and another constructed in 2015.
The tour will begin at the Yale Center for British Art. The Center, designed by architect, Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974), recently completed a major three-phase building conservation project. Attendees will have the opportunity to tour the paper conservation laboratory, which opened its doors in 1977. Attendees will meet with the conservation staff, who provide expertise and treatment for the Center’s and the Yale University Art Gallery’s collections, as well as collaborate with colleagues both at the University Library and the laboratories at the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale’s West Campus.
Attendees will have time mid-day to grab lunch and visit gallery exhibits at the Center or the Yale University Art Museum, located across Chapel Street.
After the break, participants will visit the Library’s Gates Conservation Laboratory, constructed in 2015, as the Library’s first purpose-built facility for book, paper and photograph conservation. The visit will highlight the design process and the approach taken to creating functional areas for wet treatment, an automated box making machine, expanded exhibition preparations, and photo-documentation. Staff will discuss how they planned the space to accommodate new collaborations with students, researchers and Yale’s IPCH conservation scientists. Conservation & Exhibition Services’ Traveling Scriptorium, a Medieval manuscripts material teaching kit, will be out on display in the lab. Tour attendees will also have an opportunity to visit the Library’s digital archeology lab, and digital print and audio/visual reformatting operations.
The day’s tours will conclude with a reception at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, one of the world's largest libraries devoted entirely to rare books and manuscripts; and Yale's principal repository for literary archives, early manuscripts, and rare books.
