Weissman Preservation Center celebrates 20th anniversary
Twenty years ago, you might have found Debora Mayer at her worktable in Harvard’s campus center, bent over a fragile 17th-century drawing. She would be carefully marking a photocopy of the drawing, recording each place the original document had been repaired, and eventually moving on to the next item in a steady rhythm of independent work. Mayer, who is now the Helen H. Glaser Senior Paper Conservator at the Weissman Preservation Center, works a bit differently today. She prepares collections for treatment using high-resolution, digitally scanned images, which are then entered into a database to preserve records of how and when items were treated. But the key change is that seven other conservators are working with Mayer on her current project, which is unusual for many conservation labs but common for the Weissman Center. “We work in teams; we have checks and balances,” Mayer said. “Our strength is that we’re a very collaborative...