Our conservation treatment and research projects prolong the life of documents in The National Archives’ collection, enhance understanding of the materiality of the collection and ensure continued access by all.
Below are three examples of our longer-term projects.
High use document project
High use documents are those documents that are regularly viewed and handled by the public in our reading rooms or by our Education Team during school lessons.
We gather information and data on these documents so we can monitor the effects of continual regular handling on their condition. We treat and stabilise them with preventive and interventive treatments if needed and improve their housing where necessary to safeguard against regular transport. This ensures continued access to our most popular documents while at the same time caring for and preserving them for future generations,
Through this long-term project we have established key areas which help to identify how and why damage occurs to our highly used documents and what measures we can put in place to mitigate this. Our aim is to ensure our highly used documents are protected, in good condition and handled correctly to ensure their continued access and enjoyment by all.
Before and after conservation treatment and re-housing of a highly used document to facilitate safe access.
Limp parchment binding survey project
The National Archives holds a substantial collection of limp parchment bindings, otherwise known as stationery bindings. This is a collection of hand-bound blank-books, bound for the purpose of being written in, and are characterised by their flexible parchment covers. A substantial number of limp parchment bindings belong to the Exchequer series, the financial department of the Crown. The collection spans from the 13th to 16th centuries and offers valuable information on the various stationery binding techniques and structures.
Through this project, we aim to develop and deepen our understanding of our limp parchment binding collection. Using bespoke survey forms with pre-determined and agreed-upon terminology, and with the help of two young adults from the KickStart initiative, we surveyed hundreds of documents in our limp parchment binding collection. The documentation of the features and characteristics of these bindings will become publicly available, providing a vast repository of data that can be analysed, visualised, and disseminated.
Having documented English stationery bindings in our own collection, we will expand our focus to documenting limp parchment bindings in national and regional European collections. Our ambition is to map the development and evolution of this bookbinding structure across Europe between the 13th and 16th centuries. In doing so, we aim to become a centre of knowledge and excellence for the study of English and European stationery bindings.
You can read more about this project in our blogs:
Examples of documents in our limp parchment binding collection, which dates from the 13th to 16th centuries.
Board of Trade Design Registers
One of the most visually captivating collections we hold at The National Archives is the Board of Trade Design Registers (BT). This collection contains decorative and ‘useful’ designs and inventions submitted for copyright protection between 1839–1991, in the form of drawings, paintings, photographs, and product samples, including textiles.
Over the years we have initiated several conservation projects focused on the series BT 43: Ornamental Designs (1842–1883). This vast series comprises 432 huge cloth-bound volumes, containing almost 3 million designs.
Due to the scale of the collection, it was clear that a systematic approach to preserve and digitise the BT volumes was not suitable. A survey carried out in 2013 indicated that almost 17,000 hours would be required to conserve 249 volumes.
Our approach as a department has shifted in the intervening years from traditional conservation benchwork to an approach based on the research-practitioner model. In the last 5 years we have worked on different series of the BT volumes, deepening our understanding of these complex items through analytical examination and research.
You can read more in these blogs:
- Picking up the (broken) pieces: adapting a treatment to stabilise and ensure access to severely damaged photographic glass plate negatives
- Designs in Danger: a rehousing solution for oversized transparent papers within mixed-material albums
- The pannotype mystery: Part 1 – historic photographic processes in Design Registers
- The pannotype mystery: Part 2 – identifying rare historic photographic processes
- X-rays and wallpapers: the hunt for arsenic
Stabilising powdery pigments on a design in a BT volume using a nebulised ultra-low viscosity adhesive.