Posts tagged with conservation in Blog Beyond the Reading Room

There are many beautiful and fascinating medieval and Renaissance manuscripts that can be viewed in the reading room of the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). Out of the hundreds of manuscripts found at U-M, copied in many languages and representing various cultural traditions, including those of western Europe, Byzantium, and Islam, I will be focusing on Mich. Ms. 152, an extraordinary medieval manuscript containing St. Augustine's De doctrina christiana.

The Renaissance and Medieval Manuscript Collection belonging to the University of Michigan Library consists of an impressive array of medieval and early modern manuscripts from multiple cultures and languages, including Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Ethiopian. Fortunately, many of the manuscripts within this collection have largely been left in their original bindings and most damages have gone untreated.

The University of Michigan Library and the Detroit Institute of Arts have recently collaborated in a project to produce x-ray images of the hidden structure inside a fourteenth-century Greek manuscript binding.

In early April, we welcomed conservator and researcher Cheryl Porter to campus for a lecture and 3-day workshop. In this post, Marieka Kaye (U-M Library Head of Conservation & Book Repair) offers us an overview of the workshop which explored the colors used by artists working in the Islamic and European traditions of the medieval era.

As Juli McLoone and Sigrid Cordell prepared for The Life and Times of Lizzy Bennet (Nov. 20, 2017-March 30, 2018), a number of Jane Austen's novels were identified as being in need of conservation treatment. These included a two-volume, 1838 edition of The Novels of Jane Austen. These two volumes presented some condition concerns which Cathleen A. Baker Fellow Clara Huisman treated under the supervision of Conservation Librarian/Conservator Marieka Kaye.

A curator's overview of the exhibit “The Florence Flood, November 1966: The Conservation of Books at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and Beyond.”

Guest post from Allison Donnelly, a 2016 U-M graduate and student intern at the library's conservation lab, describing her work on a recently acquired seventeenth-century Latin phrasebook!

In 2013, an extraordinary collection on the history of medicine was transferred from the Taubman Library to the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan Library. Among the books, we came across three eighteenth-century microscopes stored in plain boxes and in need of conservation treatment. They have now been repaired and are in new homes. Here is a video explaining in detail the conservation work performed in one of these wonderful microscopes.