Northshore Magazine

December 2015

Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.

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188 | DECEMBER 2015 nshoremag.com in-depth LIVE and preserve several copies of the Declaration of Independence, which were sent throughout the Colonies to be read on public commons in the 1700s. "Not many of these survived," Veillette says. "But the few that [did] are very rare and very important. We're excited to do them." Staff had just finished conserving Woody Guthrie's scrapbooks, after the American singer-songwriter's daughter, Nora Guthrie, asked the NEDCC to help her with an archive of her dad's work, now based in Oklahoma. "She spent about a year deciding whom she would trust to work with them before coming here," Veillette says. "These are the kinds of things our conservators get really excited about. Every day is fun; there's something new every day that comes in for us to evaluate." The NEDCC, founded in 1973, is the country's first independent conservation laboratory to specialize in conserving and preserving paper- based collections. The items can be as unassuming as a register from a hotel in Hawaii. But this particular project, still being assessed, is a register from the 1800s, where hotel guests describe erupting volcanoes, along with the occasional line draw- ing and clips of yellowed newspaper articles. The history here is deep, visceral, and always intriguing. The NEDCC's enormous space is filled with equipment that has an intimidating high-tech look, but the work here is actually very hands- on, with conservators using hand brushes and scalpels for many of their tasks. Every attempt is made to preserve the history of the artifact, stabilizing it so it lasts for future generations. For instance, the imag- ing lab uses flash photography to protect the object from harsh light- ing, common in scanners. When the Appalachian Mountain Hand tools are quite often used over high- tech measures.

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