Tag Archives: Julia Miller

At Home Model-Making: Ms 987

The Preservation Lab staff are all settled into the new reality of working from home. Today marks the close of our third week working remotely and quarantining ourselves during COVID-19, and after two weeks of adjustments, realizations, and finding our grooves, we thought week three was the perfect time to tackle a fun group project! You may recall last April when we were fortunate enough to have the wonderful Julia Miller come to the lab and teach us a variety of historical structures. In that one week with Julia we learned so many structures, from tablets to scrolls & rolls to a model of Ms 815. Julia also left each of us with a packet of all the materials we needed to create a model of Ms 987; a single-quire codex containing the proverbs of Solomon, which is part of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin’s collection. But in the past year, our day-to-day priorities always took precedent over model-making and we just never found the time to work on it together. Well, what better way to relieve a little stress and commemorate the anniversary of our workshop with Julia than with a little coordinated model-making!?

Since Catarina had made an Ms 987 model in a previous workshop she had taken with Julia [pictured below], she was kind enough to guide us through the steps in two Microsoft Teams chat sessions. She was also available via chat to answer any questions we had as we went along.

Catarina’s model from a previous workshop that we used as a reference during our at-home-model-making

Here are the finished at-home models:

  • Catarina’s model that will become part of the Lab’s permanent model collection
  • Sidney’s model
  • Hyacinth’s model
  • Jessica’s model
  • Jessica’s model
  • Holly’s model
  • Kasie’s model
  • Kasie’s model – like several of us, Kasie created a cutaway model, not fully pasting down one side of the leather and turn-ins and not attaching the pastedown
  • Kasie’s model featuring her furry coworker, Ru!

Many of us also took photos of our progress as we were making the models and we posted them in our Instagram stories. You can find those images within our story highlight entitled “Ms.987 Models” in the profile. We also shared our models with each other in our scheduled Friday morning video chat!

Where you can find our highlighted stories of our Ms 987 models
Kasie, Catarina, Holly, Ashleigh, and me (in the corner) showing off our models

We are so grateful to Julia for preparing all the materials for this model, as part of our workshop last April. The preparation she did for us made it so easy to construct these models at home. I would also like to thank Catarina for walking us through the construction process and for answering all our questions throughout.

Happy Friday everyone! Stay happy, stay healthy and stay safe!

Jessica Ebert [UCL] – Conservation Tech/Photographic Documentation Tech

Historic Structures with Julia Miller

For Preservation Week, we decided to treat ourselves to the best staff development imaginable: a five day intensive workshop with Julia Miller on early historical structures.  We learned so much from Julia and we are beyond grateful for her to coming to the Lab for this workshop!  What an amazingly knowledgeable instructor and wonderful human being; thank you Julia for sharing your knowledge with us!
We will probably share a more in-depth post about what we learned later, but for right now I created a compilation video of time-lapse videos I captured during our workshop.  Hope you enjoy!

Jessica Ebert [UCL] – Conservation Tech/Photographic Documentation Tech