This is a tough one - I've been racking my brains for several days trying to come up with something, particularly something I've got to hand, but I've so far come up with a big fat zero. Most of my books don't need conservation in the usual sense of the word - maybe a bit of binding repair, or cleaning, or sometimes the books are so damaged that were they valuable they might be conserved, but because they're often not rare or too old, I can usually source a replacement which is cheaper than getting a conservator in to do any work.
So I thought I'd share a conservation win from the main museum instead. People still remember the pots getting smashed 14 years ago, and they still get asked about by visitors! Here's the story about the work that was done to repair them so that they look stunning from far away, but you can see the huge amount of work done on them when you get close up.
In the meantime, I think a lot of conservation wins probably happen after conservation fails. "Oh dear, this happened, what steps do we need to take to not let it happen again?" sort of thing. I'm sure every museum has a disaster plan, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how these plans hold up to the current situation. Flood, yes, fire, no problem - but epidemic?
That brings me to another win, although it's not really conservation-related. Being part of the university, we're very lucky to have a lot of infrastructure ready for everyone to be working from home in a way that I imagine a lot of the bigger museums, particularly the ones in London, probably don't. It seems anathema to have to work away from the collections, but many of us have no choice, and the fact that we're even trying (and sometimes succeeding) is surely a win!
So I thought I'd share a conservation win from the main museum instead. People still remember the pots getting smashed 14 years ago, and they still get asked about by visitors! Here's the story about the work that was done to repair them so that they look stunning from far away, but you can see the huge amount of work done on them when you get close up.
In the meantime, I think a lot of conservation wins probably happen after conservation fails. "Oh dear, this happened, what steps do we need to take to not let it happen again?" sort of thing. I'm sure every museum has a disaster plan, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how these plans hold up to the current situation. Flood, yes, fire, no problem - but epidemic?
That brings me to another win, although it's not really conservation-related. Being part of the university, we're very lucky to have a lot of infrastructure ready for everyone to be working from home in a way that I imagine a lot of the bigger museums, particularly the ones in London, probably don't. It seems anathema to have to work away from the collections, but many of us have no choice, and the fact that we're even trying (and sometimes succeeding) is surely a win!
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