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showing 588 library results for '2007'

Preserving archives / Helen Forde. "Access to archival material - the documentary heritage of people all over the world that gives them their identity and ensures their rights - is dependent on the survival of fragile materials: paper, parchment, photographic materials, audiovisual materials and, most recently, magnetic and optical formats. The primary importance of such survival is widely acknowledged but sometimes overlooked in a rush to provide ever better means of access. But without the basic material, no services can be offered. Preservation is the heart of archival activity. Archivists in all types of organizations face questions of how to plan a preservation strategy in less than perfect circumstances, or deal with a sudden emergency. This practical book considers the causes of threats to the basic material, outlines the preservation options available and offers flexible solutions applicable in a variety of situations. Benefiting from the author's contact with international specialists at The National Archives, it offers a wide range of case studies and examples. Key topics are: understanding archive materials and their characteristics; managing digital preservation; archive buildings and their characteristics; safeguarding the building and its contents; managing archival storage; managing risks and avoiding disaster; setting up a conservation workshop; moving the records; exhibiting archives; handling the records; managing a pest control programme; using and creating surrogates; and, putting preservation into practice. This is a vital handbook for professional archivists, but also for the many librarians, curators and enthusiasts, trained and untrained, in museums, local studies centres and voluntary societies in need of good clear advice."--Provided by the publisher. 2007. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 025.85
The invention of pastel painting / Thea Burns. "Chalks and pastels are particularly appropriate materials for portraits because they appear effortlessly to convey the warm tones and soft, matte velvety surface of skin. Portraits and head studies therefore figure prominently in histories of pastel. The Invention of Pastel Painting describes the relatively sudden emergence in the later seventeenth century of sets of friable pastel sticks and a new artistic practice of painting in pastel. The author reconsiders the use of natural and fabricated drawing sticks as tools, firmly locating their use in the context of historical function. 'Artistic techniques have a social history; they are signs endowed with cultural meaning by society.' The visual, documentary and etymological evidence does not support the concept of a narrative history of pastel gradually progressing from a 'simple' original state in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Jean and Francois Clouet and the Dumonstiers to an increasingly richly coloured and technically complex visual record in the paintings of Robert Nanteuil, Joseph Vivien and Rosalba Carriera, and then continuing to evolve through the nineteenth century. In considering the history of chalk and pastel, the author argues that the change is aesthetic, not formal, and is grounded in social function and technical response. She has drawn not only on artists' letters and accounts, documents, critical and theoretical writings, and, broadly, the secondary literature, but also on close visual examination and scientific analysis of selected chalk drawings and paintings in pastel, particularly those created between 1500 and 1750."--Provided by the publisher. 2007. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 741.235