"Traditional Care Practices for Books" 2025 Care & Conservation of Manuscripts Seminar, Copenhagen

Traditional Care Practices for Books: Connecting Local Knowledge to Global Care

This video is a recording of the session “Traditional Care Practices for Books: Connecting Local Knowledge to Global Care” which was part of the Care & Conservation of Manuscripts Seminar, in Copenhagen. Filmed April 11, 2025, the plenary panel took place at the Royal Danish Library’s Queen’s Hall. In this session, conservators, historians, and knowledge-keepers discuss the traditional care of books and book-adjacent belongings, such as wampum belts and Ethiopic amulet scrolls, with the goal of sharing knowledge about traditional care and discussing the challenges and possibilities of integrating traditional care into today’s conservation and care spaces.

Chair: Alberto Campangnolo, Centre for Advanced Studies in the Renaissance (CESR) / CNRS, University of Tours/ Université catholique de Louvain
Panel organizer: Melissa Moreton, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA

Speakers include:
Melissa Moreton, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA.
Brief Overview of Traditional Care Practices Project
Introduction of Care Practices for Ethiopic Manuscripts (by Eyob Derillo, British Library)

Jasdip Singh Dhillon, Pothi Seva and Oxford Conservation Consortium, England.
“Traditional Care of Sikh Books”

Bidur Bhattarai, Written Cultural Heritage of Nepal.
“Traditional Care of Books in Nepal: The Newa Hindu-Buddhist Tradition”

Amanda McLeod, Sagkeeng First Nation, Independent curator and conservator, Canada.
"Lost Beads, Missing Stories: A Preliminary Study of the
Effects of Relative Humidity on the Deterioration of Wampum Beads"

Giselle Simon, University of Iowa, Head of Book Conservation, USA.
“The Popol Vuh and Its Quiché Relations:
A Conservator’s Experience of Collaborative Care of a Mayan Belonging”

The session was sponsored by the Mellon Foundation-funded project, Hidden Stories: New Approaches to the Local and Global History of the Book, a global book history project based out of the University of Toronto (Canada) and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (USA). In 2024, the project launched a series devoted to the traditional care of books, which connects with knowledge keepers, manuscript scholars, and conservators with traditional knowledge across several Hidden Stories research areas to share information on the handling, display, care, and storage of books. The series will be a transformative resource for a broad public of book users and caregivers to improve the care, handling, display, and storage of these heritage objects in galleries, libraries, archives, museums (GLAMs), book conservation labs, as well as for collections held by their communities of origin.

The series is viewable here: https://hiddenstories.library.utoront...