Report of the 2007 Michigan Archival Association Annual Conference

Bentley Historical Library and Ford Presidential Library
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI
June 21, 2007

Reported by Eric Alstrom, Collections Conservator

On June 21, 2007, I both attended and presented at the annual conference of the Michigan Archival Association. This organization has members from university and large institutional archives down to the small local historical museum. Although this was my first time attending this conference, I felt very familiar and comfortable, as I will mention below.

My presentation was in the "First, Do No Harm" section, which dealt with conservation for archives and its history. My presentation, "Your Gonna Do What!?!: The Conservation of Paper-based Archival Materials," focused on general principles of both preservation and conservation. For preservation, the broader term, I briefly discussed environmental and storage issues, disaster planning and reformatting. The majority of the talk was about conservation, which deals with specific items from an archival collection. I presented an overview of various conservation treatments, including creating a treatment proposal, testing of all materials, tape removal, mending tears, washing and deacidifying and finally encapsulating. Since most archives cannot do such work in-house, I outlined the issues of outsourcing work and how to find a qualified presenter. The other presenter during my session, Cathleen Baker, talked about the life of Dard Hunter, the noted paper historian, and her efforts to organize his archives and write his biography. Ms. Baker is the senior paper conservator at the University of Michigan Libraries.

I was able to attend two other sessions during the day. One was about scrapbooks, including their history, preservation and digitization. While the history was interesting and the digitization presentation made me realize how complicated scrapbooks are to digitize (i.e. not just the physical aspects, but the copyright issues can be a nightmare!), it was the preservation presentation which was most immediately useful. Shannon Zachary, head of conservation at the University of Michigan Libraries, discussed the issues from the conservator, curator and user points of view as well as the main ways to treat scrapbooks: do nothing; box; selective deconstruction; deconstruct; selective deconstruction and reconstruction; and finally, deconstruct and reconstruct. If these terms intrigue you, please let me know and I can go into more detail on each.

The other session I attended was on electronic records and how to preserve them. While this was interesting and should be of importance all of us who use the electronic medium, it was not quite as tangible (both literally and figuratively) as the other presentations. What I came away with was the amazing percentage of organizations which are doing nothing to preserve email, web pages, visual and audio files, databases and other types of electronic media. The State of Michigan archives and records management center is teaching both state and local government agencies how to handle electronic records. One interesting point was that just because the record is in an electronic medium does not mean it is treated differently for its retention and deletion. A record is a record no matter what medium it is on. Thus an email or electronic memo needs to be treated just as its paper counterpart is.

As I mentioned above, even though this was my first time attending the MAA conference, it felt very familiar to me. Besides the fact that I spent many hours during library school working at the Bentley Library (as an archival manuscript processor while working on my concentration in archival management) and while I was performing my apprenticeship with James Craven, conservator at the Bentley. I saw many old friends and colleagues, some whom I have not seen since graduating many years ago. The highlight (besides my presentation, of course) was being invited by my old conservation lab colleagues to "don the blue lab coat" and help out with the tour of the lab for the conference participants. It felt just like old timesŠ and a usual I learned a thing or two from my "master."