Conference Round-up: the Archives at AIC Houston

As we teased earlier this spring in our Facebook Live event, last week Senior Conservator Nora Lockshin and I traveled to Houston, Texas, to share our work with conservation colleagues at the 46^th annual meeting of the American Institute of Conservation (AIC). Our contributions centered around work with the Field Book Project, as did our Facebook Live. Specifically, we shared a talk in the natural history track of the general sessions on the materiality of field books, touching on topics such as inclusions (foundling items like botanical and ethnological specimens), attachments, and other materials in field books. We also share a poster that focused on a particular group of conservation treatments that utilize variations or adaptations of an established conservation practice. In addition, we also presented a tip on scrapbook preservation solutions in a lightning session on behalf of our Preservation Coordinator, Alison Reppert Gerber, which has been previously featured on our blog.

The response was hugely positive and generated some great discussion and ideas for additional variations on the conservation treatment detailed in our poster, Alison’s scrapbook tip, and Nora’s ideas about field book preservation. Look for our poster and talk to be available from AIC in print form later this year, and check out some of our previous blog posts below, highlighting some of the treatments shown on our poster and other field book thoughts touched on in the talk.

Thanks to the organizers at AIC for another spectacular annual meeting in beautiful Houston!

Related Resources

• “Flattened Between the Pages,” The Bigger Picture.
• “Conserving Harper’s Three-for-One Field Book,” The Bigger Picture.
• “A Close-up with Field Book Specimens,” The Bigger Picture.