Our last post for this week, just barely under the line, is in honor of Preservation Week. The collections at the American Theatre Architecture Archive have been loved and collected over the last forty years, but it is only within the last few years that there has been any dedicated involvement from trained archival staff. While we now have a full time staff archivist and a programming staffer with an MLS (whose hand is typing this post and whose hand is peaking into the bottom image), there is a large amount of work to be done in terms of processing and preservation.

These photos show the before and afters of a recent preservation project. This large theatre rending has been in the collection for years, but due to the earlier lack of processing knowledge, there are no provenance records. We were able to bring the chipped jig-saw puzzle of a rendering to Chicago’s Graphic Conservation Company for professional paper preservation. 

The before and after photos show the importance and integral nature of preservation work and planning, as conservators often have the ability to turn cardboard sheets of scraps into realized, recognizable images of great historical and research value.

(credit: American Theatre Architecture Archive, Theatre Historical Society of America)