There has been a lot of activity on the Book and Paper Group Wiki in the past several months. Behind the scenes, the Wiki Coordinators, Katherine Kelly and Denise Stockman, have collaborated on a reformatting template that will be used to standardize the appearance of the pages and improve navigation and readability. All of the pages have now been evaluated with regards to their need for updated content, and each has been assigned a priority rating. Updating of content will begin in earnest once the reformatting is complete.
Shortly after the 2016 AIC Annual meeting in Montréal, content from the Book and Paper Group Tips Session was published on the Wiki. This has been a welcome way for the presenters to swiftly share new information with their colleagues.
A new page was created in August 2016: BPG Adhesive Recipes and Tips. This is a companion page to Adhesives for Paper, which was originally created in 1989 as a chapter of the Paper Conservation Catalog. Seven conservators responded to the call for content and provided new recipes for wheat starch paste and isinglass, and links to published recipes for sodium alginate, funori, methylcellulose, Klucel G, ethylhydroxyethyl cellulose, and sodium carboxymethyl cellulose, as well as instructions for precoated and remoistenable tissue preparations.
In fall 2016, a content drive for the Written Documentation chapter resulted in new examples of examination and treatment forms. In October, the Bibliography Team, Laura McCann and Alex Bero, led a successful call for improvements to the bibliographies on Foxing, Surface Cleaning, Leaf Attachment/Sewing Repair, and Imaging and Digitization. This not only led to new entries, but also dramatically increased the page views for those chapters.
A big thank you to all of the BPG Wiki contributors who stepped up to help with these and other efforts: Linda Barone, Alex Bero, Susan Cobbledick, Sue Donovan, Katherine Kelly, Evan Knight, Nora Lockshin, Terry Marsh, Laura McCann, Debora D. Mayer, Suzy Morgan, Olivia Primanis, Denise Stockman, and Yana van Dyke. We also welcome our newest volunteer Wiki editors: Rachel Bissonnette, Xiaoping Cai, and Emily Williams!
The February call for content is a request for images of paper fibers for the Fiber Identification page. If you have any photos you can share, or if you want to contribute to the previous calls for content, please get in touch by writing to bookandpapergroup [dot] wiki [at] gmail [dot] com.
Denise and Katherine will be presenting these and other Wiki updates to the membership during the AIC Annual Meeting in Chicago on Thursday, June 1, from 12:00 to 12:45 p.m. They are also looking forward to a dialogue with the membership about how the Wiki is used and what areas to focus on in 2017-2018.
Denise’s term as the Paper Wiki Coordinator will end in the spring of 2018. The search for a replacement will begin in the fall of 2017.