Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts

Need tips for putting together an Emergency Preparedness and Response Plan? Join our friends at the Florida Museum Association Thursday, December 17, at 10 AM ET for 'Building Your Plan,' the latest installment of their Emergency Planning webinar series. Learn more and register at http://flamuseums.org.

In March 2021, CCAHA will present Diversity in Collections Care: Many Voices, a two-day virtual colloquium to promote exchange of research, dialogue, and inspiration. Scholarship information and registration info are coming soon. Watch ccaha.org/events and follow #DiversityInCollectionsCare for updates!

Our friends at FAIC are hosting the free webinar 'Health and Safety in Disasters' on December 9 at 2:00 PM ET. Presenter Dana Stahl is a Certified Industrial Hygienist with more than 20 years' experience managing health and safety programs in private industry and the public sector. Find the full description and registration info at the link below.

Thanks to everyone who joined us last week for our first-ever Virtual Open House series! In case you missed it, all four nights are now available on our YouTube channel. Watch now: https://bit.ly/336MdPI While we love hosting friends in person at our Philadelphia lab, under the circumstances, the online format was a great alternative, enabling five times (!) more attendees than we can normally accommodate at CCAHA and facilitating some great discussions. We look forward to doing more events like this in the future!

"The Syrian resistance fighters whom reporter Delphine Minoui profiles in her new book, The Book Collectors, surprisingly, favored self-help literature. Their counterpart to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is Stephen Covey's best-selling pop-psych Bible, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. 'This book means so much to us,' one young fighter tells Minoui. 'It's our compass, in a way ...'"

In the latest CCAHA newsletter, learn more about our first-ever virtual Open House (Nov. 9-12), a documentary from Freethink and Ancestry on Philadelphia's Eden Cemetery featuring CCAHA staff, grant opportunities from IMLS, upcoming free webinars, and more. Read more: https://conta.cc/3o4Iaw7

Join CCAHA Registrar Adrianna Province Nov. 5 at 2:00 PM for 'Handlin’ It: Techniques and Materials for Artifact Packing and Transport. ' This free webinar will address the safe handling and packing of flat and three dimensional objects, as well as best practices for packing and moving various types of artifacts, identifying potential conservation concerns before packing, and considerations for shipping during pandemic conditions. Register: https://bit.ly/2FUyqTW

Registration is open for CCAHA's 2020 Virtual Open House! This year's event will span four nights from Monday, November 9, through Thursday, November 12, combining video presentations of projects in our lab and live panel discussions. Featured objects will include items from the Edward Hopper House, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Masonic Temple Library & Museum, and more. Register ccaha.org/openhouse2020

CCAHA, in partnership with the Utah Division of Arts & Museums’ Office of Museum Services and Utah Humanities, is pleased to offer a limited number of Preservation Needs Assessments for institutions in the Intermountain West Region, completely subsidized by the NEH. A Preservation Needs Assessment is a key first step in the process of caring for collections. Learn more and apply by October 31: http://bit.ly/2IsrlHt

This summer, we welcomed a video crew from Freethink, in partnership with Ancestry, into the CCAHA lab to interview Manager of Digital Imaging Maggie Downing and Senior Book Conservator Richard Homer. We're excited to share the finished video, a compelling short documentary centered on Philadelphia's Eden Cemetery, stewards of many of the city’s earliest Black churchyards and burial grounds. CCAHA is working with Eden to conserve and digitize a selection of record books from the early 1900s, and here we see firsthand how access to this data helps one Ancestry member discover a surprising secret in her family tree.

Introducing Digitization 201 with CCAHA Manager of Digital Imaging Maggie Downing! Digitization 201 continues our series of focused webinars highlighting specific topics related to digitization project planning and completion. Our first installment is coming up Tuesday, October 6, at 2:00 PM. Register: https://bit.ly/36jVndP These webinars will tap into expertise at CCAHA in areas of conservation and fundraising, each lasting approximately 20-30 minutes and presented monthly through the end of the year. Sessions are recorded in order to be viewed as a series or according to specific subject relevant to you.

"Life hasn’t been the same in this town since the mills and the quarries shut down. As the jobs disappeared, so too did the workers and the foot traffic in downtown shops... But in recent months, artists have flocked to the vacant storefronts and massive brick exteriors, breathing life and color into the former center of commerce through a mural project called Beautify Bangor. Today, with 25 murals dotting the downtown, there’s at least one within view of every street corner."

Work continues on the collection of over 120 panoramic photos from the Rolvaag Library Special Collections and Archives at St. Olaf College. Here, CCAHA Photographer Andrew Pinkham has converted our conference room into a studio to digitize the treated photographs with a medium format camera. Each print is gently held flat on a large suction table, a conservation tool which is designed to facilitate a wide range of treatment procedures.

"Ephemeral works of art, like Maurizio Cattelan’s creation out of fruit, can often pose conservation challenges for the museums that have them."

Save the Date! Our first Virtual Open House is happening across four nights from Monday, November 9, through Thursday, November 12. We're committed to keeping the Open House tradition going this year with a series of behind-the-scenes video presentations from the lab and discussions on a variety of conservation and preservation topics. More details coming soon.