Flavio Marzo, British Library / Qatar Foundation Partnership
Active, supportive and flexible: The evolving role of book conservation in digitisation projects: the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership Digitisation Programme
Digitisation projects are increasingly becoming priorities in our cultural institutions. The importance of Conservation and Preservation within them is now widely recognised and treatment approaches matching their special requirements have been broadly discussed.
In this presentation, the author will highlight how the practical and broader skills of the book conservator has evolved to play a fundamental part in the success of a digitisation project - not only supporting it but actually enabling it from the scoping stage to the delivery of the digitised content. This will be demonstrated using the recent experience gained within a collaborative project between the British Library and the Qatar Foundation. The current first stage of the Partnership has produced 500,000 images from a variety of library material such as Arabic scientific manuscripts, files, photographic albums, maps and audio and visual content that is now accessible through a new website for the National Library of Qatar (http://www.qdl.qa/).
The discussion will focus on three themes:
1. The physical location of the conservation studio. Located within the same space as all other project strands, Conservation is placed physically close to colleagues and this has benefited the project as a whole. Equality is promoted between all project staff and cross-team communication is optimised making daily issues related to the condition of collection items, their handling and the application of best practices, readily overcome.
2. The involvement of Conservation/Preservation in all stages of the workflow has identified and resolved problems effectively and aided a life cycle analysis of objects and their needs. A customised policies and procedures document was created at the beginning of the project based on the BL Conservation ‘fit for purpose’ approach. The document addresses treatment approaches and the extent of treatment in the context of the project and set a common expectation for conservators, curators and imaging technicians alike. The knowledge of expert conservators was imperative in developing customised approaches and practices to achieve the best results without lowering quality of treatments or compromising professional ethical frameworks.
3. Conservation expertise has developed to become an independent and additional content strand within the project. Articles about the codicological features of items, explanatory videos of techniques and support for book binding terminology related to the Islamic book making contest has added indisputable value to the content of the website and to the increasingly relevant context of Islamic codicology and academic research.
As the needs of institutions change Conservation work must evolve and develop to meet new demands. Moreover, conservators are highly skilled, hands-on, practically focused, and efficient; they are used to project-based working and creative thinking. We therefore have much to offer but we need to be proactive and ready to adapt within always changing contexts.
The British Library/Qatar Foundation project has proved that Conservation remains a fundamental purpose of the institution and using Conservation expertise creatively can actually increase visibility of skills and knowledge that may otherwise be overlooked. A well-planned project can see productivity and innovation go along side with implementation of good practices and even increase the ’value’ of the processed objects by adding understanding of their physicality and improving their long term preservation.