Preservation Blog
Preservation on the brain
I had the chance to take a quick trip to London and Barcelona last week, largely for vacation, but wanted to share a few images that caught my eye for preservation reasons.
This is a wide shot of the Palau de la Musica Catalana, a beautiful Modernisme concert hall in Barcelona. I don't know all the reasons for the modern-not-modernisme addition of the glassed-over facade. It could be environmental control, protection from pollutants and city life, sound-proofing, or maybe a few of those together.
Here's are two closer shots of the facade.
In a nice recursion, we were there to hear a performance that was in itself contained a preservation event, a concert of Catalan madrigals. Most of the program was contemporary, but there were a few 17th century pieces, sung in a period style. Historical music performance practice doesn't have a lot of immediate practical application in library and archives preservation, but I think it dwells in the same theoretical space as some of the strategies we foresee for the use of emulation in digital preservation.
In London, I was struck by this section of the wall outside the Victoria and Albert Museum. The damage incurred in the Blitz has been retained as a memorial, a stark example of why conservation and restoration are distinctly different endeavors.
In a similar vein, look at this conservation effort on a paper image adhered to a wood backing. I think this is an exceptionally sensitive treatment of an ephemeral object. These devotional prints are the sort of everyday object that was deeply important in its time and place, but rarely survive. When rare examples surface, it's critical to make them available for research and exhibition, but likewise critical that their material history be undisturbed. Stabilizing the object as it is received, rather than making it "like new", keeps every avenue of research remains open. In this case, it also avoids the risk of damage inherent in making an invasive treatment on a unique and fragile object.
And finally, back to performance practice, a view of Shakespeare's Globe, and a sea of groundlings. The current Globe is a reconstruction and presents plays in historical and modernized style (or both at once; I saw a very smart version of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus that was well-grounded in Elizabethan practice but clearly knew which century it was being staged in, as well). Reconstruction and re-presentation are preservation methods that I think we'll need to find a theoretical space for as libraries, archives, and museums develop.
