Fletcher Durant

10 Questions with an Art Conservator How exactly does one repair the crown damaged in the Louvre heist?

A good introduction to how conservation work on a complex item is considered.

open.substack.com/pub/anthonya...

YouTube video by Steve Parker FUNERAL FOR A TREE

"When a 65-year-old tree in Parker’s front yard died of oak wilt, he cut the trunk into “wood cookies” + transformed them into playable records, each encoded with migratory birdsong... The project emerged from Parker’s recognition that his grief for the tree echoed the loss of his father to cancer"

Director and Curator, Special Collections and Archives - Middlebury College Reporting to the Dean of the Library, the Director and Curator of Special Collections provides leadership, vision, and budget oversight for Middlebury’s special collections, including its rare book an...

JOB ALERT! 📜📚

Who wants to be director & curator of special collections & archives at Middlebury College (Vermont!) — & work for a wonderful boss (& one of my favorite people), Rebekah Irwin?

apply.workable.com/middleburyco...

Cleaning out his mom's house, Boston man finds his ancestor's freedom papers Researchers in Boston are diving deep into his family tree to connect the missing links.

Great to see a conservator like Todd involved in this story.

www.wcvb.com/article/bost...

Tremendous heat in South Texas today! 104° F - in February - makes this the Hottest temperature ever recorded in winter in the US!

This is why we do this work. Support your local archivist.

This is SO COOL — a lost Méliès film from 1895 in which a person plays a briefly out of control robot. How timely. So glad some of my tax dollars are still going to stuff like this

👆🧵👇 🐑 🐑 Sheep disease evidence retrieved from parchment!

Also, didn’t the horses get sent to the glue factory?

You’ve hear of dos-a-dos but have you seen…..

DOS-DOS-A-DOS-A-DOS?!

🔥 The huge 25,000 acre #fire burning in the #Everglades has been sending smoke south. That will change overnight and Wednesday. Get ready for the smell of #smoke into Central #Florida tomorrow.
This fire is a preview of things to come this spring due to our worst #drought in 25 years. 🔥

Absolute shocker of a rights grab - academics may want to push back hard

Between politically motivated take-downs, the things going behind log-ins due to AI scraping, and the things being taken offline because they're PDFs, 2026 is going to be a record year for collections loss online.

Editorial: Florida’s fire risk keeps climbing. Don’t ignore it Florida is in the grip of a record drought. Floridians can see it in the withered tones of roadside vegetation and hear it in the dry crunch of their once-green lawns. But those who have been aroun…

"But many Floridians — particularly those who have moved here since 1998 and have no prior experience with wildfires on a massive scale — don’t see these signs and don’t comprehend the omens. They arrived ready to worry about hurricanes, but might not think of fire in the same hazardous terms."

Two people analyze a binder of slides. Text reads: New ways of working to protect cultural heritage. Read full story getty.edu/news

Archivists 🤝 conservators

Getty is working to bring these two historically siloed fields together to enrich collaboration and solve problems. gty.art/4tI2DIX

Oldest known whale song recordings discovered in Cape Cod archives The files, found on a bygone piece of audio recording equipment, may give scientists new evidence about how humans have changed the ocean.

The discovery trope, but this time the archivist is discovering. 📜
www.wbur.org/news/2026/02...

A lot of glass zoology specimen jars of varying sizes on shelves.

The Wet Collections Wing at Berlin's Museum of Natural History.

This is a new phenomenon and business model exploiting gaps in publishing. The cartel uses fake names to produce AI-written or plagiarised papers. Reference lists contain 100s of paid entries.If papers are retracted, no real authors are punished, and citations still count, even from retracted papers

So that's at least two of the top programs for archivists & librarians being subsumed into a new unit for computing and AI, and I'm guessing many more to follow.

The British Newspaper Archive reaches 100 million pages We celebrate this milestone and our long partnership with Find My Past by picking a few highlights from the BNA.

To celebrate the BNA reaching 100 million pages, my colleague Claire O'Halloran has written a blog sharing some of our highlights. A huge achievement-well done to everyone involved at @britishlibrary.bsky.social & @findmypast.bsky.social Here’s to the next 100 million! www.bl.uk/stories/blog...

Yesterday, those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it.

Yes, you read that correctly. The *state* is enforcing a curriculum on college profs, complete w/ the following restrictions:

My MP3 and t shirt collections beg to differ.

The scroll eventually came into possession of the New-York Historical Society (now known as the New York Historical) and in 1948 came into the hands of the Brooklyn Museum. Flash forward to the 2000s, where a three-year effort, led by the superstar conservator Ahmed Tarek and museum conservators Lisa Bruno, Sara Bone, and Josephine Jenks, worked to separate the papyrus from the acidic backing that it had been mounted on, and find a way to stabilize it for generations to come. "It's kind of like if you took shredded wheat and had it flattened, it's just really brittle," said Bruno. The team used gels to deliver water to the scroll in a controlled manner, and they were able to painstakingly separate the moistened papyrus from the backing. They then mounted it again on special superfine, kozo-fiber Japanese paper, which can be a little as 0.02mm in thickness per sheet.

When reading any story about the painstaking restoration of a work of art by conservators (here, a gilded papyrus of the Egyptian Book of the Dead), I wait for the part where conservators describe how they had to undo the destructive work done by previous conservators, and it never fails to arrive.

Every couple of years the same article comes about about an ambitious information storage mechanism. Like 7 years ago it was etched nickel plates getting shot onto the moon: "the civilizational backup disk". There's no reason to debase ourselves thinking through moronic ideas

Nazi letters reveal paper restorers’ role in compiling Holocaust ‘hitlist’ Exclusive: Research uncovers programme to make centuries-old records legible to detect people’s ancestry

"A British historian has uncovered a Europe-wide programme in the 1930s and 1940s in which restorers repaired and cleaned historic church and civil records, making them legible so that the Nazis could detect anyone with Jewish ancestry." www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Stone, parchment or laser-written glass? Scientists find new way to preserve data Hard disks and magnetic tape have a limited lifespan, but glass storage developed by Microsoft could last millennia

Features me, commenting: no one "is choosing to build infrastructure that will support the information needs of future generations... we should pour our scant resources into fixing the aftermath of the cyber-attacks on the British Library" instead of this... www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Condition reporting as didactic signage gain artifactual value.

I will share more of our findings as we get into data analysis, but we're reviewing energy usage & climate impact metrics for our cloud-hosted digital collections at MPOW, and the results have been really misaligned with what our expectations were. I strongly encourage other folks to do this.

I am once again asking.

Any frameworks out there for evaluating faculty allocation of effort on (refereed) data work?