In my efforts to investigate the Liturgy & Life Collection, I wanted to understand how we are caring for these items today and what the status was on preserving Leonard's extensive collection. I spoke to Nora in her Conservation Lab about her process of making custom boxes for unconventional items.
How do you make custom housing for items like the statues in Liturgy & Life?
"There are an endless number of boxing structures, often we buy them, a bunch of different common sizes, and we can adjust the inside if something is unusual in shape to better support it. Sometimes, there isn't a great size that is ready-made, like with the Mary statue; she's very tall, but not very big. We can just custom make a box for her here.
Other than the size, the other important consideration for making these boxes were that they not be made with glue, they are completely non-adhesive. It's held together with cotton tie-tape."
Why do you not want to use adhesive?
"Because even our friendliest adhesives have some off-gas, which means that as they age, they release some gas. So my go-to for rare or archival materials is a wheat-starch paste, which is just the starch of wheat and water, and it doesn't let off anything. It's a powder, and I cook it, and it smells like Cream of Wheat cereal. Its just not as strong an adhesive as the plasticized adhesive, like PVC, which is much stronger, but lets off some gases. It's field ethics: to only use reversible, non-off-gassing materials that have passed all the quality assurance testing, beyond acid-free, when we are working with special collections materials.
The goal for these items [in the archive] is indefinite preservation. What we want is to keep them forever, so every decision we make has to be really carefully thought through, since its about the full longevity of the item we are caring for."
How do you secure a statue like Mary in a cardboard box?
"So I traced her base, and then in the base of her box there is a cutout that she slots into. She's not seatbelted, like some of our things are, but I really didn't want to put anything tight on her because there is so much fabric. There's lace, and her face is also quite fragile."
Is there a need to be putting all the Liturgy & Life in boxes?
"Well a lot of them are big, and relatively stable, so we just cover them. They're going to stay on those shelves, they are not going to be heavy use, and the expectation is realistically little to none. So the only need is to keep them clean, and not dusty. They don't need to be stable for transport, they just need to be stable on the shelf.
So Lit & Life things that needed unusual boxes were Mary, because she's such a textile, she's wobbly, she's got real human hair, a lot going on. And a crucifix statue, also very tall, and it has a lot of small fragile bits sticking out in all different directions. A box makes it much safer to handle, and we were able to seatbelt it to the back wall as well so it was most stable."
When we put items on display, does that damage them? How concerned are you about this?
"The answer is yes, and we make all the decisions we can to reduce that damage. With all our things, if it cannot leave the vault, be taken out, or looked at, then why do we have it? Because we're keeping it safe, and that's not a meaningless factor, but we also have a responsibility to provide access to these materials for further scholarship and understandings of history and culture. Part of all of our jobs is to facilitate that use in the absolute safest way possible, like with custom enclosures, cradles, a monitored reading room, and exhibitions are a part of that too. Sunlight is damaging, but less light is less damaging; the lights in the Irish Room [at Burns] are LED, which is far less damaging than UV light. If something is on display that is usually in our stacks, we put it in a place that we know is safe, or set a loan agreement with specific light levels, temperature, humidity, and security when we loan it out."