Preparing 17th-Century Texts for the EarlyPrint Digitization Project
Posted May 12, 2022
For the past couple of years, Northwestern University Libraries has been working to digitize a large group of English-language titles printed before the year...Profile Roger Williams
Roger is the Book & Paper Conservator at Northwestern University Libraries.
Collaborating with engineering students to create an open-design conservation tool
Posted September 18, 2020
Book conservators treat volumes that vary in size, shape, and functionality. When treating the interior of a book, the binding often needs to be...
The John Cage Scrapbooks: Pre- and Post-Digitization Conservation
Posted August 15, 2019
From August 8 to 11, Northwestern hosted “Dancing in Common,” the annual conference of the Dance Studies Association. In conjunction with the conference, the...
Stabilizing history: How and why we rebound a 15th-Century manuscript
Posted November 16, 2018
Last year, this 15th-century book of hours came down to the Northwestern Libraries conservation lab for rebinding. The manuscript had previously been rebound at...
On a Roll: Creating a Futomaki-style Preservation Housing for a Large Map
Posted April 25, 2018
Many paper items in library collections are simply too large to be stored flat. If an item is larger than any available flat filing...
A Spark of Curiosity: Finding an anti-strike coating for match heads
Posted February 20, 2018
By Roger Williams, Conservation Fellow We recently treated a scrapbook once belonging to Ardis Nadine Kuhnen, an Evanston resident and Northwestern alumna (B.S. ’51)....
Seeing in “4D”: Bucky Fuller’s manifesto & conservation decision-making
Posted April 20, 2017
Conservators do their best to inflict as little change as possible on the items they treat. Sometimes this rule is straightforward; at other times,...
The Red Scare: Washing & lining early Soviet propaganda posters
Posted January 25, 2017
Deering Special Collections has a group of roughly 250 Soviet propaganda posters, primarily from the 1930s and 1940s. A number of the posters were...