![]() When the Library’s fair copy of his logbook was brought to our conservation lab for examination, its binding had completely failed, and the deteriorated iron gall ink had significantly cracked and broken the paper. James Cook's voyage in Endeavour, 1768-1771, was the first European expedition to include scientific discovery as a major objective. The Library also has an active outgoing loans programme to cultural organisations regionally, nationally and internationally. The Library’s Registrars manage and coordinate the loans programme while balancing the Library’s obligation for the care, safety and security of the collection, and the increasing demands on physical access to original items. They arrange for the insurance, packing, safe transportation, handling and display of items, and their rehousing on return from loan. The registrars and conservators assess and prepare all items for display, working with exhibition designers and curators to make items accessible in new and interesting ways. These can include works from our collection and incoming loans. The Library has a dynamic program of onsite exhibitions and displays. The Digitisation team advises on collection handling, scanning equipment and appropriate item supports, and ensures safe and timely digitisation of our collections. The digitisation team assesses the condition of collection items to be digitised and recommends and carries out treatments to stabilise or repair items ready for digital scanning. The Library has an active programme of collection digitisation to facilitate access and discovery of its collections. Collection material is assessed and prioritised for in-depth treatment or for quick, stabilising repairs that allow items to continue to be used without further damage. The conservators are responsible for the treatment of the Library’s diverse and extensive collections. Monitoring light, temperature, and relative humidity are critical in significantly reducing, or controlling damage and deterioration of collections. Preventive conservators also ensure stable environmental standards and conditions are monitored and maintained across the various collection formats. The Preventive Conservation team is responsible for identifying and managing risk to collections working with our Facilities Branch to provide integrated pest management across the Library counter disaster and salvage procedures and for providing safe manual handling training, advice and guidelines for staff and visitors to ensure the risk to the Library’s working collection is minimised. The Library’s preventive conservators and storage specialists work across all collection, display and staff areas of the Library to manage the appropriate storage of collections to ensure that over 130 linear km of collections are protected from damage, that client access is maintained and also plan for continued collection growth in the decades ahead. Equally important is the obligation to preserve the collections for use and discovery by current and future generations. The Library’s collections include many diverse formats: books and serials, as well as manuscripts, prints, drawings and paintings, photographs and negatives, architectural plans and maps, realia, film, oral history and sound recordings. Collection care is divided into a number of teams of highly skilled conservators, registrars and storage specialists with responsibility for preventive conservation, collections and storage paper and photographs books, objects and paintings digitisation and exhibitions and loans. The recipe for gold calls for unusual ingredients: sulfur, cow's milk, and donkey urine.Collection care ensures that the Library’s rich and extensive collections are available to all those who wish to use them. Each evangelist is writing the beginning of his own Gospel, which is legible if you zoom in on the books they are holding.Īn alchemistic recipe in Arabic for making gold (on left). Each of the evangelists is accompanied by a symbolic being: the winged angel for Matthew, the lion for Mark, the bull for Luke, and the eagle for John. ![]() ![]() This page shows the four evangelists: Matthew (lower right), Mark (lower left), Luke (upper right), and John (upper left). These leaves are from the 19th Surah of the Quran, which mentions Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Coptic language is the last survival of the ancient language of the pharaohs, written in an adaptation of the Greek alphabet that includes a few additional letters. A small fragment of a religious text in Coptic on papyrus.
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