Conservation In Action: Courier trip to USA with items from the Wellcome Library’s Asian Collection

Since 2011, as part of the Preservation and Conservation team, I have been focusing on the preparation of items from the Wellcome Library for internal exhibitions in the Wellcome Collection temporary exhibition space or for external loans, which have seen borrowers from the UK, Europe and overseas.

As an Exhibition Conservator, I work closely with the Library Exhibition Liaison Officer, discussing condition environmental parameters and display requirements for every single item going to be displayed. The Library receives numerous loan requests per year with peaks of workload during the two months before openings, which fall mostly during Spring and Autumn.

After the first approach from the borrowing institution and confirmation of the list of objects, I start with assessment of the physical condition of each item. Following verification that the items are stable enough to travel and to be exhibited, I continue with their documentation on the Conservation Database and if necessary, I proceed with conservation treatment in order to stabilise their physical condition and improve manual handling. I also arrange the framing and display mounting of items with the valuable help of some external art technicians.


Conservation of Islamic Call. 90, “A saying of the Prophet Muhammad”.



Tear repairing and flattening of object from the back.

Part of my role as Exhibits Conservator is also to accompany the items and install them at the borrowing venue. Last February, I accompanied nine items from our Asian Collection to the Brigham Young University Museum in Provo, Utah, USA.


Items documented and mounted at the Conservation studio before despatch

My journey started on a Tuesday morning, coincidentally on St. Valentine’s Day. Myself and the other two girls couriering from the British Museum and the Ashmolean, Oxford were hoping that as a consolation for the 3.45 am start that morning, we would be given a red rose... but that sadly did not happen. Exhausted, we were instead promptly driven down to a Heathrow Airport warehouse following the climate-controlled, AirRide vehicle that was transporting objects to Utah from four UK institutions (Wellcome Library, British Museum, V&A and Ashmolean).

Two empty crates arrived at the Wellcome Library. The Library material was individually soft- wrapped, carefully placed inside the crate and surrounded with layers of Polyurethane foam

The pallet containing the crates was loaded onto the cargo plane ready to travel to Los Angeles

Brigham Young Museum of Art (BYU) was hosting an exhibition of Islamic Art for the first time, following a long tradition of exhibitions relating to Christianity. The exhibition “Beauty and Belief: Crossing Bridges with the Arts of Islamic Culture” at BYU is the first venue of a touring show that will also exhibit at Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Newark Museum and the Portland Art Museum. It showcases more than 250 objects from various lenders in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Curated by the art historian and artist Sabiha Al Khemir, the show spans the entire main floor of the Brigham Museum.

After an incredibly long journey of thirty hours, we finally arrived at Provo at 1 am. The next morning my day at the Museum was spent checking the condition of the items after all that travelling, noting any possible changes and working together with the local Museum art technician on the display, which had been discussed and agreed previously between the two institutions. Materials such as oil paintings, drawings and prints are often displayed framed and hung on wall using security fixings whereas archival flat items, manuscripts and books are usually placed carefully into showcases and either laid flat (sometimes on a barrier sheet of archival board or Mylar®/ Melinex® polyester film) or laid on custom made Perspex supports.

One of the highlights from the Wellcome Library was Arabic MS 1011, “Scroll of Prayers signed by Zayn al-'Abidin”, which was beautifully displayed on its own, exhibiting a meter and a half of its length.

Marking the base of the showcase with tape in preparation for the display of Arabic MS 1011, “Scroll of Prayers signed by Zayn al-'Abidin”.

Detail of the mounting system which prevents the item rolling back on itself.

Other Wellcome Library items were sharing cases with objects from other lending institutions. The curator and couriers were all working together to make sure that the objects were placed perfectly inside the case. When the final display was refined, the showcases were secured in place, locked and witnessed before our departure.

After returning to London, the Library Exhibition Liaison Officer and I received an email from the BYU Museum Registrar, thanking us for all of our helpful support during the preparation and build-up to the loan and for the work on the installation day. The opening day was a great success and the exhibition is still being well attended.

Marking the space on a showcase for the final display solution



Arabic MS 300, “Map of the World”, was placed on a tilted support to facilitate reading.



The Perspex lid of the showcase was carefully lowered before the final locking.



External view of Brigham Young University Museum of Fine Art



 Beauty and Belief: Crossing Bridges with the Arts of Islamic Culture, Brigham Young University Museum of Fine Art, Provo, Utah, 24th February to 29th September 2012
Author: Luana Franceschet

Historic Arabic medical manuscripts go online

The Wellcome Library is pleased to announce the launch of Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts Online, a digital manuscript library created in partnership with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and King's College London Department of Digital Humanities.

From the official press release:

Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world, and now digital facsimiles of some of its most important texts have been made freely available online. The unique online resource, based on the Wellcome Library's Arabic manuscript collection, includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners (such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis), lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies, such as Averroes' commentaries on Avicenna's medical poetry...

Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, expressed his enthusiasm for the project: "Providing global access to our collections is at the heart of our mission to foster collaborative research, and we are delighted to see these particular treasures become freely accessible online. We are grateful to the Library of Alexandria and Kings College London, whose partnership in this project has enabled us to extend the availability of these rare materials to the countries of their origin."

Funded by the JISC and the Wellcome Trust, the Wellcome Arabic Cataloguing Partnership (WAMCP) was initiated in 2009 with the aim to make the Wellcome's Arabic manuscripts available and to establish a standard in Arabic manuscript cataloguing and display.

This began with the creation of the "cataloguing tool". A schema was adapted from the existing ENRICH schema to allow for non-Western manuscript description. The tool, the repository, and the website was developed by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina with direction from the Wellcome and King's College London team members.

Although the cataloguing tool has been in use for many months now (with over 450 manuscript records now completed or in progress), the website was only released to the public today, with a sample of around 120 manuscript records available to view. The remaining manuscript records will be made available online throughout the summer.

Image: WMS Arabic 529 - Anonymous book of magic spells

Guest post: Elena Pierazzo on the Arabic ENRICH schema

Elena Pierazzo, from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London describes a new metadata schema for Arabic manuscript cataloguing. The Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Partnership, as previously announced, is working toward providing greater access to the Arabic manuscripts held in the Wellcome Library. One of the goals was to employ a metadata schema appropriate to the rich descriptions that can be captured for this type of material. Elena Pierazzo developed this schema.

The task of creating a cataloguing model for the Wellcome Library has represented for me an exciting opportunity to learn a lot about Arabic manuscripts. My experience so far, although extensive, had only concerned Western manuscripts and I was curious to see where the differences, if any, were to be found. Needless to say, the challenge has proved to be invigorating and rewarding at the same time.

Two main design principles were established from the very beginning:

1. The model should provide a flexible, extendable framework able to accommodate sophisticated data relating to the structure of the physical object (the manuscript) as well as its cultural content. In a manuscript the text cannot be separated from its container without loss of information, the two representing the yin and the yang, body and soul of the same entity.

2. The model should be compliant to the main international standards for cataloguing and classification.

A model based on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) seemed to be then the best choice. The TEI Guidelines provide a very flexible but rigorous framework for encoding humanities data of a heterogeneous nature. TEI uses XML as a base technology, meaning that the records expressed in TEI are software and platform independent and can be easily used on the web. Furthermore the TEI Guidelines provide scholarly support for every sector of the humanities. In particular, TEI has proved extremely successful for cataloguing manuscripts, having been chosen as the basis of a very important European cataloguing project called ENRICH which had the aim to provide a framework for the cataloguing of European manuscripts across different countries and libraries.

For us, the possibility of adopting the same format used by the ENRICH project was very appealing, as it would allow us to share and interchange data with other libraries and scholars in Europe and beyond. On the other hand, this model had been designed to describe and catalogue western manuscripts; therefore we soon found that some adjustments were necessary. We had, for instance, to increase the number of possible calendars to cover a wider variety of dates and to substitute entirely the list of the types of script used by the scribes. The project in the end, required extensive customization of the schema in order to ensure compliance with established standards (such as those of the Library of Congress) as well as emerging ones (the Ligatus project), while at the same time trying to maintain compliance with ENRICH.

While we were developing the model for the Wellcome Library, another important initiative for cataloguing Arabic manuscripts was coming to the same conclusions; this was the joint JISC project undertaken by the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Cambridge University Library. The model produced for the Wellcome Library was evaluated positively by the Oxbridge project team, and they decided to adapt it for their own catalogues. This makes our model the main format for cataloguing Arabic manuscripts in the UK.

We think that what we have called the Arabic ENRICH schema could also be used by other libraries and projects, and for this reason we decided to make it available for everybody. A annotated template of a typical record and the ODD file that is used for generating a TEI schema are available via the Wellcome Library’s project website. (If you don’t know what an ODD file is or you are not familiar with the TEI Guidelines, you can find more information from the TEI website).

Dr Elena Pierazzo
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King’s College London

Library Year In Review 2009 goes live

Last week the Library launched its latest Year In Review. This year, we have opted for an electronic-only format, and the PDF of the Review is available for viewing and downloading from our website.

2009 was the Library's busiest year to date, with visitor numbers topping the 38,000 mark. The Review focuses on services for our in-person visitors, and also showcases a number of initiatives which are available via the web for our users worldwide.

We hope you enjoy the Review. As ever we are keen to hear from our users about their research and how they make use of the Library and its resources, so please feel free to get in touch.

Download the Year In Review 2009 [PDF 3.3 MB] (Right click to save)