Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mooring a Field: Paul N. Banks and the Education of Library and Archives Conservators

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/libraries.5.2.0300

2473-036X

Eric C. Stoykovich,

Digital and Traditional Archives Management

The slow rise and uneven success of book and paper conservation education within the academic libraries of the United States is just one of the stories that professional conservator, archival educator, and PhD in American Studies Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa aptly tells in Mooring a Field: Paul N. Banks and the Education of Library and Archives Conservation. Cunningham-Kruppa, now the associate director for preservation and conservation at the Harry Ransom Center, carries the reader through a number of intersecting and topically adjacent narratives in a book that is far more entertaining and informative than the misleading mixed-metaphor title and the drab photograph of Banks on the book jacket might suggest. Not a full biography of Paul N. Banks (we learn of his sexuality but not his relationships), Mooring a Field is nonetheless held together by the activities, visions, and programs of Banks within book, library, and archives conservation, each of which he influenced during a career spanning forty-five years, from his departure from Carnegie Tech's School of Printing Management in 1956 to his death at sixty-six in 2000.1Few secondary sources on the history of library or archival conservation in the twentieth century exist, so Cunningham-Kruppa can make the first round of claims.2 The California-born Banks, who is represented in the second edition of the Dictionary of American Library Biography (2003), deserves this extended treatment because, in Cunningham-Kruppa's words, he was central to “the professionalization of the field of library and archives conservation” and he was “a primary architect of library and archives conservation education in the U.S.” (10). Banks's role in the founding and teaching of the Conservation Education Programs (CEP) at Columbia University's School of Library Service in fall 1981 was probably his greatest professional achievement. On the other hand, it seems that his quest “to moor” the discipline of library and archives conservation within library science was unsuccessful, as the teaching of conservation within library science was ultimately transitory. Today, the discipline is taught in its most concentrated form within art and museum conservation programs.Admirably, Cunningham-Kruppa views Banks's professional work within a broad cast of characters and contexts. Chapter 1 describes the early years of the precocious Banks, who demonstrated an interest in fine letterpress printing and hand bookbinding at a young age. Moving to New York City in the mid-1950s, Banks discovered a warm if small community of people with practical knowledge of the book arts, including the 75–100 members of the Guild of Book Workers (GBW). Notable among them were Carolyn P. Horton, Philomena C. Houlihan, and Harold Tribolet. In the 1962 GBW Membership List, Banks listed himself as “bookbinder, calligrapher, designer, specialist in restoration and repair, and professional (as opposed to amateur) teacher” (30). At that time, prestigious libraries with rare book collections paid book binders for industrial bindings and restorers for skilled work, but it was art museums that were taking the lead in developing the practices and intellectual apparatus of preservation.Banks's move to Chicago's Newberry Library in 1964 to take the position of conservator and head of the Conservation Department was both fortuitous and transformative. Over the next seventeen years, Banks helped preserve the Newberry's collection of 1.3 million bound volumes and 5 million manuscripts through innovative ideas, such as an insistence on quality binding, an avoidance of irreversible conservation actions, the nurturing of conservators who learned on the job, and the building of climate-controlled storage (notably, the planning for an air-controlled ten-floor “bookstack” at the Newberry). Treating both circulating and general collections with care was necessary, Banks foresaw correctly, because the passage of time would eventually make general collections rarer.Yet Cunningham-Kruppa's focus lies not on the impact that Banks had on the Newberry's physical library collections, tracing instead Banks's evolving views of conservation education (50–51). Similarly, chapter 2 presents another wide panorama—that of the impact of the rescue of books and art submerged in November 1966 under the floodwaters of the Arno River in Florence, Italy—to examine Banks's understanding of conservation remediation applied to the aggregate. Banks made a couple of trips to Florence and served as chair of the Study Committee on Book Conservation within the Committee to Rescue Italian Art (CRIA).3 However, as CRIA mostly wrote reports and defined problems in search of solutions, Cunningham-Kruppa's claim that “Banks played a key role in the Florence rescue” is difficult to accept at face value (55).4 Indeed, as the biographer admits, Banks rarely adopted the most tactful approach, often issuing blunt advice and giving in to “ego, hubris, and impatience” (91). Moreover, many of his recommendations were disregarded by international conservators and local Italian leaders.Returning in chapters 3 and 4 to what Cunnigham-Kruppa views as the main struggle of Banks's professional career, the book describes in detail the various proposals and false starts that represented Banks's repeated, almost quixotic, efforts during the late 1960s and 1970s to obtain institutional funding and external support for a “conservation center” (94). The center that Banks envisioned was to train a generation of conservators in the modern tools and preservation concepts, such as mass stabilization of library materials, mitigation of poor paper manufacturing, and development of educational credentials for conservators. Library schools in the Chicago area largely ignored his advice, so he kept his options open to include art programs. He publicly conceded by 1975 that the latter were “generally not anxious to take prospective book conservators” (151).Success on some of his vision came only when Banks returned to New York City to head the CEP at Columbia. Not surprisingly, then, the book's narrative veers somewhat away from Banks to introduce the enthusiastic married duo at Columbia, Pamela and Richard Darling, who were, respectively, the first head of preservation, and director of University Libraries. In 1976 Pamela Darling had hired Banks on behalf of the Metropolitan New York Library Council to study “the feasibility of establishing a cooperative conservation center for the city's libraries,” which complemented Banks's teaching of a course at Columbia (144). Five years later, the creation of CEP within Columbia's library school (SLS)—with help from teaching colleagues in the Rare Book Program and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center—gave conservation education the visibility, funding, and high rate of graduate placement that helped make the field more professional and well regarded by library administrators. But the financial unsteadiness of Columbia's SLS and the heavy reliance on grants doomed the CEP, leading to its removal to UT-Austin in 1992 and ultimately its closure in 2011. By that time, three art conservation education programs had won pilot grants from the Mellon Foundation to foster library and archives conservation education. The conclusion critically analyzes and prescribes the intellectual, research, and cultural consequences of this shift.No matter how beautifully bound, well researched, and well written Mooring a Field is as a physical book—and it is all of these—the audience for Mooring a Field may be as uncertain as the audience for library and archives conservation turned out to be within the LIS discipline. Librarians and archivists generally view bookbinders and conservators like Paul N. Banks as fellow travelers, not direct forebears. Moreover, state-of-the-art book and paper conservation has established its most stable basis—not in academic or university libraries (outside of a few well-funded exceptions like Harvard and Columbia)—but rather in the federal government (e.g., Library of Congress, National Archives–College Park), independent contractors (e.g., HF Group–Etherington Conservation Services), nonprofit organizations with fee or subscription services (e.g., Northeast Document Conservation Center, Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts), and independent research libraries (e.g., The Huntington, Harry Ransom Center). Most tellingly, the current Newberry Library's staff listing—with eight members having “digital” in their titles compared to five people in the Conservation Services Department—reflects the unmistakable shift to digital within independent research libraries.