Volume 13, Number 8
Dec 1989

Reports of European Events

• Sue Murphy attended the ICOM 15th Triennial General Conference at the Hague, at the end of August, and had praise for the Conservation Committee s working group on training, which met two days. The group had a three-part program, focussing on curators and librarians, students and teachers. They are working to integrate conservation into museology and other courses in the schools. Cohn Pearson heads this group.

  It is a good idea, she advises, to write ahead and find out exactly when a group is meeting. They have time blocked out, but may not use all of it. She found this meeting only by chance.

• Anne Tedeschi sent an eyewitness account of the mostra [exhibition] that just closed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciane in Venice. She writes, "There is a nice catalog, Legature Bizantine Vaticane e Marciane: storia dei materiali e delle tecniche di manifattura, that was produced for it which has some of the illustrations and several drawings that I suppose were in the original. It is only Lire 10,000 [about $7.50], but again it is entirely in Italian except for a short paragraph at the beginning. It reproduces the preface on the Vatican books, and has one also on the Marciana books. I would assume that one could write to the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice for a copy.

  "The show itself was rather curious. I have never seen one done quite this way. It was not very large; along one side of the room huge panels of excellent photographs illustrated every aspect of the structure and binding methods, and the explanations were photographed, enlarged and mounted with them. The original books in the exhibit cases were, though wonderful, relatively few; they were heavily supported by modern models in every possible state of binding; even the materials and their method of manufacture were carefully shown. There was an emphasis on the interrelations of the work of the artisans involved in book making.

  "The captions with the books in the cases were the only disappointing part: they were almost entirely lacking bibliographically. You really did not know what book you were looking at some of the tine, and there was no effort to give provenance, etc. Even though this played no part in the purpose of the exhibit, I found that it bothered me; I don't like to see the book as an artifact or the book as a bibliographic entry ever entirely separated. Nevertheless, I think it is probably the most thorough exhibit on binding methods I have ever seen."

• ISO, the International Organization for Standards, invited its member countries to nominate experts for a joint working group to advise the two subcommittees working on a standard for permanence of paper for documents. The idea is to cover both paper technology and user requirements in WI [Work Item] 114.1 and WI 114.2, which are the standards for uncoated and coated paper, respectively. Am Italian organization called UNI, Ente Nazionale Italiano di Unificazione (Italian National Organization for Unification?), responded in July by calling a convention of interested experts for September to form a national working group to engage in international standards activities for permanence of paper for documents. No report has been received yet of this meeting, but it should be noted that this seems to be a separate initiative from that of Antonio Zappala, whose naive questionnaire was described in the June issue of this Newsletter, p. 40-41. (The international meeting that was to have been held toward the end of 1989 to discuss the problem of brittle paper seems to have been called off.) Eventually there may be quite a number of groups and agencies in Italy that are working for paper permanence, just as there are in the U.S.