Just a very short blog post to flag the fact that our staffed hours have changed from Thursday morning to Tuesday afternoons, 1400-1800. All are welcome to visit to consult our collections, just contact us to arrange an appointment! Our details are here.

The Chantry Library moved to Grove Cottage from the Ashmolean Museum on November 2^nd 2001. Judith Chantry had looked after the library for many years when it was housed within Ashmole’s Paper Conservation Studio (after a move from the India Office), and the Chantry family made a major gift to the library after Judith’s death in 1999.

OCC is pleased to support the Library, to celebrate its long association with Oxford conservators, students, and readers, and to remember Judith Chantry’s contribution to the conservation profession!

Many thanks to Dana Norris and Kenneth Watt, donating on behalf of the ICON Ceramics & Glass Working Group, for a copy  of the September conference held in London Recent advance in class and ceramics conservation 2019. The conference was the Interim Meeting of the ICON-CC Glass & Ceramics Working Group and the ICON Ceramics and Glass Group Conference.

Our copy, at the time of writing unique in Oxford, is now on SOLO: http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/f/89vilt/oxfaleph021736491

The Library has received by donation the newly published Treasures of Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This follows on from a very successful event in Blackwell Hall, the ‘Sacred Scripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea Activity Day’, at which three OCC conservators spent several happy hours as volunteers helping Sacred Scripts attendees to bind a notebook using techniques seen in Ethiopian and Eritrean manuscripts from the Bodleian’s collections.

For more info on the activity day, please see the event webpage.

 

The Chantry recently hosted an extended research visit from Surjit Singh, a second-year MA student from the National Museum Institute, New Delhi. In his two-month study visit to the UK, Surjit has been immersed in conservation, history of the book, and Sikh manuscripts in particular. At Chantry he has been reading extensively on paper making and intends to prepare a seminar as part of his MA course comparing South Asian and Western papermaking.

The titles he consulted included old classics by Dard Hunter as well as more recently acquired books such as Timothy Barrett’s “European Hand Papermaking” and Sylvia Albro’s “Fabriano”, both of which were acquired through donations received at the 2018 ICON Book and Paper Conference in Oxford.

Librarians do like piles of books as a sign of activity! It was great to host Surjit and provide some interesting reading matter for him. If you are interested in South Asian paper you might want to look at the subject bibliography by Oxford Conservation Consortium’s own Jasdip Singh Dhillon.

 

We are very pleased about *another* donation of material, this time of material relating to the conservation of the historic built environment.  It’s great to be able to extend our coverage in areas beyond our traditional strengths in book and paper conservation. The donation supplements our current holdings, filling out some partial series that were already present in the library, especially the “Short guides” and “Technical advice notes” produced by Historic Scotland. There are also some bilingual Welsh texts that should be interest to process. As a librarian it is always good to have fresh things to accession into the collection, and the Chantry Library is very grateful to donors who kindly enabled us to extend what we hold. Thank you! New books will be added onto SOLO (some are on already) but for now here is a quick handlist:

1. Cadw. Renewable energy and your historic building [bilingual English and Welsh]
2. Historic Environment Group, Climate change and the historic environment of Wales: A summary of potential impacts. [bilingual English and Welsh]
3. Cadw. Conservation Principles: for the sustainable management of the historic environment in Wales. [bilingual English and Welsh]
4. Historic Environment Scotland. Short Guide 13: Applied Digital Documentation in the Historic Environment.
5. Historic Environment Scotland. Sash & Case Windows. A short guide for home owners.
6. IHBC. CONTEXT, No 137 November 2014.
7. ASCHB Transactions 39, 2017.
8. ASCHB Transactions 38, 2015.
9. Historic Environment Scotland. Short Guide 1: Fabric Improvements for Energy Efficiency in Traditional Buildings.
10. Historic Environment Scotland. Short Guide 3: The Repair and Maintenance of War
    Memorials.
11. Historic Environment Scotland. Technical Advice Note 9: Stonecleaning of Granite Buildings.
12. Historic Environment Scotland. Technical Advice Note 10: Biological Growths on Sandstone Buildings.
13. Historic Environment Scotland. Technical Advice Note 12: Quarries of Scotland.
14. Historic Environment Scotland. Technical Advice Note 23: Non-destructive investigation of standing structures.
15. Historic Environment Scotland. Technical Advice Note 25: Maintenance and Repair of Cleaned Stone Buildings.
16. Historic Environment Scotland. Short Guide 10: Thermal Imaging in the Historic
    Environment.
17. Historic Environment Scotland. Short Guide 4: Maintenance and Repair Techniques for Traditional Cast Iron.
18. Historic Environment Scotland. Short Guide 7: Scottish Traditional Brickwork.
19. Historic Environment Scotland. Short Guide 6: Lime Mortars in Traditional Buildings.
20. Historic Environment Scotland. Short Guide 8: Micro-renewables in the Historic
    Environment.
21. Historic Environment Scotland. Short Guide 9: Maintaining your Home.

Chantry blog followers may remember a fantastic talk given by Oxford-based wall paintings conservator, Bianca Madden, on conserving Theban tomb paintings (see our post April 13 2018). We asked Bianca to contribute to our Subject Bibliographies project, and are delighted to announce that her ‘take’ on Egyptian Tomb paintings is now live on the Library website. A taster of Bianca’s introduction follows:

“The field of the conservation of Egyptian tomb paintings has, until recently, received considerably less attention and research than that of other areas of painting and wall painting conservation – this is partly due to the fact that up until the mid-20^th century site-based tomb paintings were valued largely for their information, which was preserved through recording and study, and their material fate was less widely considered.”

“The books and articles suggested below cover the basic literature in the field of Egyptian paintings conservation as well as a little of the Egyptological context of the work. They pay particular attention to research and articles into the materials and techniques of construction.  The key for conservation is in understanding the materials and components of the paintings and coatings, and from that to apply conservation practice and processes on a case by case basis.”

If you’re Oxford-based, many of the works Bianca refers to are available at the Bodleian or Sackler Library.

Today the Chantry Library and OCC were very happy to host a short visit and tour for collections staff from Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History. The very friendly guests included conservation as well as library and archive staff amongst other specialisms. After being introduced to  the collections and shown round the Library by the (camera-shy) Librarian, the visitors took a few minutes to browse enthusiastically round our collections.

Jane Eagan then talked to them about the conservation work that goes on at OCC more generally – rudely interrupted for a quick photo-call!

The museum staff were then taken on a tour of the conservation studio, where OCC conservators gave them a taste of some of the projects currently being undertaken.

By a lucky coincidence some of the current projects involved material with a natural history dimension, including one with biological specimens. Common themes – such as the use of Japanese paper or tissue in different areas of conservation work – soon cropped up.

It was a great pleasure to host such an informed and interested group, and various of us at OCC look forward to a return visit to the Museum.

 

 

 

IIC have launched a new interactive format for their News in Conservation. See page 14 for a feature on the history of ICCROM’s conservation library. Velios and St John outline the linked conservation data and terminology project on p.22, and Georgios Boudalis’ Codex and Crafts, recently purchased for the Chantry collection, is reviewed on p.33.

https://issuu.com/nic_iiconservation/docs/nic-new-format-issuu-april2019?e=37416082/68863202