We hold regular exhibitions in order to raise the profile of the service and the collections in our care here at the University of Leicester. With my colleague Ian Swirles I recently put together a show about scrapbooks; we have some really interesting ones in the rare book collections and archives but they can be quite vulnerable to damage.
They often have lots of glued-in enclosures and their spines may be under considerable pressure due to the bulk of all the added items.
Many of our scrapbooks contain newspaper cuttings, which are particularly susceptible to light exposure – it’s a real issue in the space we have here, which is light 24/7. We secured funding for the manufacture of special display case covers to protect the contents from over-exposure to light.
We also reorganised the displays, starting by identifying themes, such as scrapbooks created as a hobby, to those that act as a record of a personal experience, to ones on the history of an organisation.
My favourite scrapbook is the one compiled by Dr Astley Clarke, one of the founding fathers of the university, an institution that was instigated as a “living war memorial” after the first world war.
The scrapbook was digitised and conserved last year to mitigate the pressures of over-use, so we were able to make use of the surrogates instead of the unwieldy original.
We adopted a similar approach for another of our iconic items, a scrapbook collated by the controversial playwright from Leicester, Joe Orton (1933-67); there has been a tendency, in
times gone by, to display this item more often than is consistent with good practice.
Caroline Sampson is special collections archivist at the University of Leicester
They often have lots of glued-in enclosures and their spines may be under considerable pressure due to the bulk of all the added items.
Many of our scrapbooks contain newspaper cuttings, which are particularly susceptible to light exposure – it’s a real issue in the space we have here, which is light 24/7. We secured funding for the manufacture of special display case covers to protect the contents from over-exposure to light.
We also reorganised the displays, starting by identifying themes, such as scrapbooks created as a hobby, to those that act as a record of a personal experience, to ones on the history of an organisation.
My favourite scrapbook is the one compiled by Dr Astley Clarke, one of the founding fathers of the university, an institution that was instigated as a “living war memorial” after the first world war.
The scrapbook was digitised and conserved last year to mitigate the pressures of over-use, so we were able to make use of the surrogates instead of the unwieldy original.
We adopted a similar approach for another of our iconic items, a scrapbook collated by the controversial playwright from Leicester, Joe Orton (1933-67); there has been a tendency, in
times gone by, to display this item more often than is consistent with good practice.
Caroline Sampson is special collections archivist at the University of Leicester
