Editorial

Abstract

Volume . of the AICCM Bulletin is dedicated to the proceedings of the th AICCM Book, Paper & Photographic Materials Symposium, which took place from  to  November  at Melbourne Museum, Museums Victoria, Australia. It was the vision of the Organising Committee that the symposium would provide a forum to learn, reflect, share and connect. We wanted not only to disseminate new information and ideas within the conservation community, but to promote interdisciplinary research, encourage reflection on our treatment and preservation approaches, and to consider how the world around us affects our decisions. This volume presents a selection of papers and keynote addresses that clearly represent this vision. In particular, these papers are united by their focus on unfamiliar, uncharted or challenging territory that asks the authors and readers alike to reconsider traditional approaches. The first two papers demonstrate the criticality of understanding the historical, material and social interests of the collections in our care, to ensure their appropriate long-term preservation and to inform treatment decisions. In particular, they remind us that it’s the responsibility of the conservator to ‘know when we don’t know’ and to seek out the appropriate resources or advice. In Keppel’s paper, Nineteenth-century Islamic Manuscripts and Printed Books: Revisiting a Survey of the Michael Abbott Collection, State Library Victoria, specialist knowledge was sought for a collection that had lost proximity to the communities that could best interpret and maintain its cultural meaning. A collection survey of Qur’ans and religious texts undertaken in  is re-examined in light of new skills learned during an Islamic Bookbinding workshop presented at the Islamic Arts Museum ofMalaysia. Revisiting the survey in  identified previously overlooked structural features and provided a crucial frame of reference, giving original observations greater depth and meaning. In Murphy’s paper, Art on Paper / Variable Installation: Sara Hughes’ Torpedo at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, traditional conservation approaches are found to be at odds with the variable nature of contemporary art. The author considers the issues of originality, authenticity and variability posed by contemporary art on paper installations through the examination of Torpedo by Sara Hughes. In this case, close collaboration with the artist and systematic documentation processes resulted in a conservation and display approach that ensures the care and maintenance of the physical object, while also embracing the work’s inherent variability. The next two papers demonstrate that sometimes it is the conservator’s role to be intrepid and make the best decisions possible with the information at hand—even if that means embarking on a complex treatment without precedence in the conservation literature, or to strike out and generate that research ourselves. In each instance, these papers aim to ensure that future conservators will have the tools to make informed decisions. In Conservation of the th Battalion Book of Remembrance by Melzer, Mitchelson and Woodward, time and resources were in short supply when a fire and flood-damaged parchment volume arrived at Grimwade Conservation Services. Understanding the limitations of traditional disaster response methods in the case of bound waterlogged parchment, the authors consulted widely with colleagues and searched available literature. However, few useful case studies were available. Nonetheless, the swift disbinding and freezing of the object bought crucial time to separate and flatten the parchment leaves, resulting in a successful outcome and proving the feasibility of this treatment pathway. In Chu and Nel’s paper, Characterisation and Deterioration of Stone Papers, the authors address a research gap in the conservation literature pertaining to the properties and degradation of stone paper. Invented in the late s, this synthetic paper-like material is commercially available in the form of books, notebooks and artists’ paper. However, for environmental reasons stone paper is designed to photo-degrade rapidly, complicating its future preservation and care. The authors use a range of visual and analytical techniques to provide a greater understanding of the composition of stone paper, its ageing trajectory, and its response to environmental factors. This data will help to inform the identification, storage, display and treatment of stone paper collections. Our keynote papers give us important insights into what researchers and artists value in paper-based and photographic collections and introduce new ways of thinking about what attributes are important to preserve during preservation and conservation activities. Antarctic historian Elizabeth Leane prizes the ‘dispersed, disordered and deteriorated condition’ of polar and asylum archives, which proved integral to understanding an Antarctic wireless operator’s lived experience. These important records effectively