A Taste of Training
My name is Nicole Monjeau, and I am a Preventive Conservator here at the British Library. I am new to both preventive conservation and the Library, and I thought I would write my first blog post about one of my favourite aspects of my new role—training.
I come from a paper conservation background, and one of the things I enjoyed most about my previous roles was outreach. I loved sharing information about conservation with the public and with colleagues, and found it fulfilling to have such engaged and interested listeners. Collection care awareness is one of the things which drew me to this role, and I was excited to dive right in.
One of my first tasks upon starting at the Library was to help carry out handling training during Doctoral Open Days for PhD students. These sessions introduce PhD students to the range of research materials available in the British Library and specialist curators and other postgraduate students from across the UK.
During these events, myself and my colleagues spoke with PhD students about the best ways to handle books and other collection items whilst carrying out research at the Library. We showed some tools which can be utilised to make handling easier, such as foam supports to properly support books and snake weights to help hold book pages down gently. The final PhD Open Day in late February provided even more opportunity for outreach. In addition to handling training, we were able to show off some of the conservation tools and techniques we use when treating collection items. This proved to be quite popular, with the PhD students enjoying the opportunity to learn about tear repairs and bookbinding in addition to handling.
These PhD Open Days were a nice introduction to collection care awareness, and a nice way to ease into the training that the Preventive Conservation team does. The Preventive team are now preparing to deliver a series of collection care training sessions to a variety of staff members across the Library, and my experience at the Doctoral Open Days will prove helpful. It’s allowed me to become familiar with our training material and has also helped me to gain confidence in conducting a training session.
Carrying out training has also meant that I’ve been involved in a variety of training-related activities. I have been working on creating a poster and pamphlets which can be used during training sessions. The pamphlets will hopefully be a helpful guide which people can use to remind themselves of how best to support and handle collection materials, and the poster will be a nice visual aid during training sessions.
It’s also been a pleasure to work with a wide variety of colleagues in the British Library Centre for Conservation. It’s great fun to work with people from different backgrounds, and this only helps our training sessions to be more informative and useful. A big thank you to everyone who has helped the Preventive Team carry out training!