Conservation at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Precious pigments and high-tech solutions: unlocking Chester Beatty texts. Library conservators combine science and creativity in protecting and restoring the collection of 20,000 objects (Dick Ahlstrom, The Irish Times).

There are few places where sticky goop made from fish meets mass spectrometry, other than in the conservation unit of a museum. The old and the new sit easily together, however, when in the hands of experts.

The conservation unit of the Chester Beatty Library is just such a place. It has some of the oldest documents in Europe and one of the world’s finest collections of Qur’ans. There are rare and precious objects, such as imperial robes from ancient China and surgical tools dating back a millennium.

The collection includes more than 20,000 objects, of which only 1 per cent of which are on display at any one time. It was assembled by Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, an Irish- American mining millionaire, who was born in the US, was naturalised British in 1933, and was granted honorary Irish citizenship in 1957.

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A number of projects are described, including these two:

[Chief conservator and head of collections Jessica] Baldwin referred to a conservation challenge, the Manichaean papyrus that she describes as “the sod of turf”. It suffered from repeated floodings by the Nile river before being acquired by Beatty and is in poor condition.

Yet it may hold the last text of the Iranian prophet Mani who founded the Manichaean religion. It thrived during the third to seventh centuries, spreading from the Mediterranean across to China, and rivalled Christianity at the time.
She is studying ways to retrieve the texts it holds, unlocking a text that has been closed for centuries.

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Conservator Julia Poirier is working on the Samaritan Pentateuch dating from 1339, part of the Hebrew collection at the library. She applies ancient Japanese techniques to conserve the pages. She uses “washi”, a form of tough paper made from the mulberry tree to strengthen cracks and breaks in the pages. She dyes it with “yasha” made by boiling up alder tree cones, to achieve a good colour match with the parchment.

She sticks bits of the dyed washi to reinforce the parchment using “isinglass”, a kind of glue made from the swimming bladder of the sturgeon fish.

Yet high tech enters in a collaboration with University of York where cells are lifted from the parchment for DNA analysis to determine what animal provided the original skins and to measure any deterioration.

More on the Chester Beatty collection is here and here.

UPDATE: Broken link now fixed!