Curious to learn more about what happens to damaged archival materials, I arranged a tour of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts back home in Philadelphia, in February 2020. I didn’t know at the time that it would be my last in-person reporting trip before much of the U.S. shut down. Dyani Feige, the director of preservation services at CCAHA, said of the center’s work: “Preservation is really the underpinning of collections. We would not have collections without preservation.”
The tour greatly eased my fears about inflicting accidental damage when handling primary documents. In a space that’s part artist’s workshop, part science lab, conservators work magic, performing feats of restoration I never imagined possible. I watched as a paper conservator submerged an Auguste Rodin watercolor in a bath of deionized water to undo the darkening the paper had experienced from light exposure. At another table, several 1920s panoramic photos of rodeo performers sat waiting to have enormous longwise tears painstakingly repaired. Coiled for storage, the photos had grown brittle and tore when unrolled. In front of another conservator was a large abstract painting, thick and impossibly black with a heart of blue. On its way to America from a London gallery, its frame failed. Once the conservator had cleared the shattered glass embedded in the art, he hunched over a magnifying glass, holding up tiny flecks of the paper’s edges that had ripped off to find where they belonged.
I also learned that some of the worst enemies of precious artifacts aren’t humans but mice, insects, and moisture. A copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle had come in to have sections of its cover mended. Made of rag paper in the late 1400s, the book blossomed with vibrantly colored woodcut illustrations. Metals in the paints were slowly breaking down the paper. A conservator invited me to smell the text to see if I could detect the rat-urine aroma he’d noted. To me, it just smelled musty. The bottom corners of the pages had been darkened by centuries of oily fingers flipping pages. The conservator imagined people sitting down to lunch while thumbing through it.
The pandemic complicated archival restoration efforts—you can’t exactly mend the Nuremberg Chronicle remotely. Most labs, archives, libraries, and museums closed, at least temporarily. The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training was quick to offer advice on personal protection equipment, disinfecting artifacts, and safe reopening. The American Institute for Conservation collected a trove of resources relating to caring for collections and the people who interact with them during the pandemic.