Activity : Certificate in Conservation and Preservation of Books and Documents – course

Date : 16 June 2019 – 22 September 2019 (17 days)

Time : 9:30 am – 5:00 pm

Duration : 15 hours

 

Description of activity

The subject area of the activity is about conversation and preservation of books and documents. The activity was a 17 days certificate course which organized by HKU SPACE. The course was taught by adjunct lecturer Lai, C. Y. The target learner was librarians. In this course, students were divided into four small groups. They needed to complete different tasks individually after watching demonstrations by the lecturer. The task included three binding exercises and three assignments.

 

Reflection of activity

The course was designed to teach students theories and skills about construction of book binding, paper characteristics, binding method and conservation treatment of paper book in order to deal with daily book maintenance works in libraries. I have attended this course because I wanted to learn the conservation skills of books.

 

In this course, I understood the characteristics and usage of paper, white glue and paste. In the first stage, I learnt the construction of perfect binding and hardcover binding through completed three binding exercises. The first exercise was to make a hardcover binding book. The second exercise was to make a perfect binding book with book cloth cover. The third exercise was to make a perfect binding book with plastic cover. The skills I learnt from the exercises including paper folding, sewing, making covers, hot blocking to the covers, spine gluing and casing-in. For making the hardcover binding book, I learnt the skills including rounding, sticking endband and ribbon bookmark, making a box for protecting the book, decorating book edge by colour. For making the perfect binding book, I learnt the skills including hand-sewn endband, marbling the book edges and making plastic cover.

In the second stage, I learnt how to make a leather book and ledger through doing the assignments. For making the leather book, I learnt the skills including folding large paper, sewing with cords, sticking wallpaper on the cover, nipping up the bands in covering, handing leather of book edges and hot blocking to the leather labels. For making the ledger, the skills I learnt including folding large paper, sewing with cloths, wrapping the book spine and book edges using cloths. Besides learning the skills of binding, the course also enriched my conservation knowledge including types of leather, papermaking, causes of damage and conservation treatment of old books.

 

The knowledge and skills from the course benefited to my work. Since there were some damaged books including dictionary, bible, bible commentary and storybook in my workplace. They had different kinds of damages such as boards detached, tears in pages and missing parts of pages. After learning from the course, I will try to repair the book using conservation treatment and materials in order to provide the best preservation to them.