On Tuesday May 8, a group of 13 conservation professionals visited the Sandoval County Historical Society (SCHS) to assist SCHS volunteers in several preservation projects for the 2012 Angels Project as part of AIC’s 40th Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, NM.
SCHS is located just outside of Albuquerque, in Bernalillo, and was established in 1977 to collect and preserve the history of Sandoval County. The collections include photo and paper archives, paintings, and maps. This slide show shows some images from the photo archives.
We were warmly received by SCHS with baked goods and coffee and after an orientation of the collections and the history of the Historical Society, we split into teams and began tackling different projects, including:
– Rolled Maps: unrolling and flattening of the maps and re-housing in map cases
– Painting storage: cleaning the shelves and wrapping the unframed paintings for additional protection
– Photo and paper archives: basic inventory of archive contents, hardware removal, re-housing fragile or unprotected items in archival sleeves and folders
In all of these activities, Angels Project volunteers worked alongside SCHS volunteers so that this work could be continued and maintained in the future. In addition, paper conservator Renée Wolcott spent some time speaking with the SCHS volunteers about conservation and basic preservation activities, and answered their questions about environment, pest management and other preservation concerns.
It was rewarding to see so many volunteers from the community that day who obviously care deeply about the Historical Society, its collections, and the importance of SCHS to the people of Bernalillo and the surrounding communities. Jason Church did a great job documenting the project-look for his photos on the AIC Flickr site.