Document Conservation Center

New England Document Conservation Center, Abbott Hall, School St., Andover, Mass. 01810... 

Thomas W. Duncan was the book and paper conservator at the museum during these investigations. He is presently associated with the New England Document Conservation Center, Andover, Mass. The author is grateful for his direct assistance in planning and implementing these investigations. 

One of the tribulations of the New England Document Conservation Center is that very few people can remember our name. This was driven home to us earlier this summer when a client sent us a number of prints for treatment, and addressed her package Paper Conservation Center, North Andover, Massachusetts. We received a call from someone at the town dump who said a package of prints, which appeared to be for us, had been delivered to their paper recycling program. It was fortunate that some employee noticed this was the first time they had ever received trash by registered mail. 

The New England Document Conservation Center, or NEDCC, was founded six years ago by the New England Library Board, with the help of start-up funds from the Council on Library Resources. The purpose was to provide paper conservation services to libraries, historical organizations, and public records offices that could not afford in-house laboratories. The idea was that a shared resource could eliminate wasteful duplication of equipment and make available on a regional basis the skills of professional paper conservators. It was expected that after a start-up period, the Center would be self-supporting through fees for its services. 

NEDCC is located in Abbot Hall on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It is the only regional center in the country specifically oriented to conservation of library and archival materials as opposed to museum collections. Having begun life in the basement of the Merrimack Valley Textile Museum, we are pleased that we now have windows on all four sides. We have a large, spacious paper conservation laboratory, and specialized equipment such as our Israeli-made leaf caster. This is used to fill losses in book pages or documents and to reinforce crumbled edges. 

Professional conservation is labor intensive by nature. It requires highly skilled staff and takes a lot of time. Thorough examination must proceed treatment. Every step must be done by hand and should be documented thoroughly. A photographic record must be kept. Even in a nonprofit, regional center, conservation cannot be performed cheaply. In general, our services are appropriate for rare materials but not for the mass of research collections. 

Training. One of the principal missions of the Center is to train people to restore and conserve the documental and bibliographic riches of the nation as prescribed in the decree of 1969. Restorers are trained at the Center in a school that requires three years of intensive study and practice. The instructors are personnel of the Center, members of the Professional Corps of Archivists, Librarians, and Archaeologists, and professors of local universities. The first year is divided equally between theoretical and practical courses, the second is practical, the third year is for practical specialization. There are also concentrated, one-year courses primarily for Latin American students, although many from other parts of Europe have attended. Most of those who take these courses have a background of experience in restoration or are practicing archivists and librarians. 

The Nazarov cyclization is an example of a 47r-electrocyclic closure of a pentadienylic cation. The evidence in support of this idea is primarily stereochemical. The basic tenets of the theory of electrocyclic reactions make very clear predictions about the relative configuration of the substituents on the newly formed bond of the five-membered ring. Because the formation of a cyclopentenone often destroys one of the newly created centers, special substrates must be constructed to aUow this relationship to be preserved. Prior to the enunciation of the theory of conservation of orbital symmetry, Deno and Sorensen had observed the facile thermal cyclization of pentadienylic cations and subsequent rearrangements of the resulting cyclopentenyl cations. Unfortunately, these secondary rearrangements thwarted early attempts to verify the stereochemical predictions of orbital symmetry control. Subsequent studies with Ae pentamethyl derivative were successful. - The most convincing evidence for a pericyclic mechanism came from Woodward, Lehr and Kurland, who documented the complementary rotatory pathways for the thermal (conrotatory) and photochemical (disrotatoiy) cyclizations, precisely as predicted by the conservation of orbital symmetry (Scheme 5). 

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act allows states to establish regulations more stringent than federal standards. Although the act is intended to minimize potential health hazards, some states want complete assurance of no long-term health effects. According to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia to adequately document and ensure that incinerator emissions do not cause cancer, a 30-year epidemiological... 

---