A treatment survey template is attached with this posting. It has been drawn up by members of the international group of conservators who work on archival seals, and who collaborate under the aegis of the ICA (last meeting Oxford 2007) and by member Manuela Belli of Rome, who is completing a Masters thesis on seal conservation. The template is a simple table, published here in Microsoft Excel, into which conservators can input information about the methods they have used to conserve seals of all kinds. The table attached has a few worked examples inserted to assist. Could any member who is interested in contributing please download a copy, insert your data and return to acrg.administrator@fastmail.fm where the separate contributions will be combined into one document and posted again on this site for information.

The Oxford 2007 Congress on recent research into seal conservation produced some useful debates and information sharing and its notes and papers will soon be posted here for members to download if they wish. The template for recording different treatment types was devised collectively at the congress and subsequently. It is hoped not only that the collected information will be a useful source in itself for seal conservation, but that this simple template approach to risk benefit analsyis of treatment types may be used for other treatments. If any member would like to see a similar exercise carried out for other materials (such as paper documents or parchment manuscripts etc) do let us know via this site or direct to me.

Group Administrator