Volume 15, Number 4
Jul 1991

Events in the News

• Dard Hunter himself would enjoy attending the program planned for the next Friends of the Dard Hunter Paper Museum meeting, to be held in Grants Pass, Oregon, October 16-20. This is the Friends' 10th anniversary year. There will be about 16 speakers, including Cathleen Baker, Tim Barrett, Elaine Koretsky and Julie Sugarman, and their papers will cover papermaking in foreign countries, paper history, book and paper arts, and technical aspects of hand papermaking.
• Simon Green writes that there are now 304 registrants for the 1992 IPC conference in Manchester, England. He says the organizers strongly recommend registration in the near future to avoid disappointment.
• There was a symposium on video preservation at the Museum of Modern Art June 13-14, sponsored by the Media Alliance and the New York State Council on the Arts. It was limited to 50 participants with experience and expertise in the field. A report synthesizing information from the preliminary research and the symposium will be written by Deirdre Boyle and disseminated to the field. For more information contact Mary Esbjornson, Media Alliance, c/o WNER, 356 W. 58th St., New York, NY 10019 (212/560-2919).
• The Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of ALA has its own meeting each year, ahead of the ALA meeting and in some other town. This year the Preconference was held in Chapel Hill and Durham, and was entitled, "Keeping the Facts in Artifacts: Conserving the Physical Evidence of Special Collections Materials and its Impact on Research." Speakers included Nicholas Pickwoad, Barbra Buckner Higginbotham, Carolyn Clark Morrow, John Townsend, Margaret Child, Jan Paris, Michael Winship, and (from the floor) Terry Belanger. Pickwoad and Winship both pointed out that conservatorial intervention inevitably destroys historical evidence. Paris described the conservator's dilemma of simultaneously preserving historical veracity and making an item usable. Winship made a couple of points that may not be as contradictory as they seem: 1) It would be too bad if the existence of a microfilm in one repository led other repositories to destroy their originals. 2) He was fearful that duplicate libraries would be the effect of book vendors' approval plans.
• The Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine adopted in 1986 the preservation policy of encouraging the publishing industry to use acid-free paper for biomedical publications so that the preservation problem can be stopped at the source. The efforts of NLM and related activities nationwide concerned with the preventative approach to the preservation of scientific, scholarly, historical, and government records have met with gratifying acceptance. A one-day open, no-fee symposium on October 25, 1991 at the Library's Lister Hill Center auditorium in Bethesda, ND will give an accounting of the progress and of the future course in encouraging acid-free paper use for an audience of publishers, preservationists, paper industry representatives, librarians, researchers and authors, and the concerned public. Contact NLM Special Projects Officer 301/496-0592.