Every month I write a local heritage-themed column, on behalf of The Treasury, for the
Grahamstown Gazette. Here's my piece for the June 2015 edition.
From The
Treasury:
We had some fantastic news at the beginning of May: The Treasury Research Centre and Archive
won the Heritage Award at the recent Waikato / Bay of Plenty Architecture
Awards, and is now eligible for a New Zealand Architecture Award this
November. The judges called our two buildings a 'clever and elegant pair' and
commended the archive as 'shamelessly contemporary,' with the ability to
'transform the town's view of the value of good architecture, in terms of both
its historic and future heritage.' We are thrilled to see the hard work that
went into this project being recognised at such a high level. The awards are
held annually by the New Zealand Institute of Architects.
The Carnegie Library building is open to the public, but
we often are asked what exactly goes on inside the Archive building. If you’ve
ever walked past us on Queen St or Davy St, you might have caught a glimpse of
our volunteers in the workroom sorting, cleaning and preparing archival
documents for storage.
The first stop for newly donated items is the fumigation
room at the back of the building. By fumigating or freezing the documents, we
can get rid of the bugs that love to lurk in old papers – silverfish and mould
are serious issues for archives. Next, the volunteers clean up the items and
get a good sense of the significance of what has been donated. Different
objects require different cleaning techniques. Old letter books, for example,
often have a lot of dust between the pages, so you’ll often see us using a dry brush
to gently remove the dust from pages and spines.
There are several different volunteer teams working in
the building to prepare different types of archival documents. Our Photography
Section have a separate darkened room where they deal with photographs,
negatives and film. Eventually we hope to buy equipment for digitising and
copying these photos. Meanwhile, our Archive group deals with paper items –
loose documents, books, newspapers and plans.
When the items are debugged, clean, arranged and
described, they are stored in acid-free boxes or folders in the Archive room.
This room uses state of the art technology to preserve the items. It is
temperature controlled, and has special lighting and fire prevention technology
to ensure the documents are safely stored. We use a series of huge shelving
systems on wheels to store everything safely.
While the Archive is a work area and not open to the
general public, we do occasionally take special interest groups for
pre-arranged tours. If your group would be interested in learning more about The
Treasury, give us a call.
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