Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Our close proximity to the museums we are working with gives us the advantage of easy communication with their curators. Leigh Ann Randak of the Johnson County Historical Society was able to come down to see how our Head Conservator, Gary Frost, was coming along with the ledgers and county registers he had been working on. Being able to see what is being done gave her a better idea of how long things would take and how complicated the process would be. When figuring out how much money you have relative to saving a collection it makes all the difference to know exactly what is being done and to have the option to say, “this book wiill take 6 hours to fix and it’s not worth the money when we could replace it and save three others in that time for that amount of money”. Leigh Ann has been able to come down multiple times to go through the books and manuscripts to decide what we should work on and what can be replaced or let go.

The ledger shown in this photograph was already taken apart and was in loose sheets when we got it. Gary used the “double fan” method to bind the pages together using a very thin layer of adhesive on the spine before re-casing it into a new buckram cover.