Hello all,

Today I am writing to introduce myself as the newest member of the York Explore team: the Past Caring Project Conservator. Over the next year and a half, I will be working with the Project Archivist Julie-Ann Vickers on the Past Caring Project (find out more about the Past Caring Project on our dedicated page, or our previous blog posts).

While Julie-Ann works on researching and cataloguing the informational content of the archive, my task is to take care of the physical aspects of the collection. I will be assessing the condition of the archives and carrying out preservation and remedial conservation work to ensure the material can be handled by readers, as well as ensuring the future accessibility of the material.

As a book and archive conservator, my goal for this project is to help balance the preservation and access needs of a collection. Maintaining the physical collection is important to keep the records available for the long term and to enable readers access to its intellectual value. In my next blog post, I will talk more about the specific conservation issues of the Past Caring project.

In the months ahead I will be looking for volunteers to help with the preservation and conservation process, so if you are interested in working with historic material, drop me a line or keep up to date with the Explore York blog as more information on how to volunteer will be posted in future blog posts.

I will be posting here about once a month and regularly contributing to our twitter account.

Thanks for reading!

Tiffany

Thoughts? Questions? Just want to chat about conservation? Feel free to email me at archives@exploreyork.org.uk

• archive project
• Conservation
• Past Caring Project