Today I had the pleasure of attending a Paper Conservation Workshop put on by the Archives Association of Ontario’s Southwestern Ontario Chapter. The four hour workshop was taught by Mary Gladwin of the County of Oxford Archives and was held at Weldon Library here on campus. Mary was a delightful teacher and showed us how to safely remove staples and smooth out any holes, showed us how to clean paper materials using Skum-X Cleaning Powder (awesome name btw and can be found at Carr McLean), how to repair tears using archival repair tape and Japanese repair tissue, and how to encapsulate paper materials for protection. We were each given 3 original bank notes from the late-19th century to clean and repair to clean and repair and we all had a lot of fun doing it! There was a fellow MLIS student in attendance as were Mary Kosta and Jenn Vickers who are the Archivist and Archival Intern at the Sisters of St. Joseph Archives here in London where I volunteered last summer so it was lovely to catch up with them. At the end we were each given an information booklet and a kit with some supply and material samples which was a lovely surprise!! Here are some pictures from the event:
Liber-Libre
Librarian – Archivist – Bookbinder
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Liber-Libre 
That looks like so much fun. I wish I had attended! I’ll have to keep a watch out for their workshops in the future, do you know if they have a mailing list or RSS feed to follow?
Yeah it was cool!! I can show you one day too! Maybe in the spring because school is too crazy right now lol
I am on two listservs that send out cool information (the ARCAN and AAOLIST ones) which can be found here http://www.archivescanada.ca/car/car_e.asp?l=e&a=listserv
If I see anything like that again I will also let you know! 😀
Nice to see. Conservation is a big part of librarianship if you have a rare books collection. Learning to deal with not just paper but things like vellum, leather, wood and metals, all in one package is tricky business.