As you might imagine remote work for a preservation lab is…complicated.  Not all items awaiting treatment are good candidates for repair in the home studios of staff – the repair might require specialized equipment that is only available in the lab (e.g. suction table), the item may be too valuable to transport to a private home without engaging UC risk management and CHPL administration (i.e. all our special collections!), or the object may be too large to safely be worked on in our diminutive setups (e.g. many books with the folio designation). 

But, that doesn’t mean that work from home isn’t happening!  The image below is a batch of completed treatments awaiting return to our partners.  These treatments are general circulating items that have been repaired, as well as items receiving custom enclosures created without the object, using just the objects measurements. The materials have been treated from home and now, on our new abbreviated lab schedule, are being end processed and returned to their originating institutions. 

Though we all deeply miss the day-to-day work in the Preservation Lab, remotely we maintain our ethos of preservation stewardship keeping us connected to the lab’s preservation mission and the missions of our parent institutions.  In this, we remain unchanged. 

Holly Prochaska (UCL) — Preservation Librarian