Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/603345
186 | DECEMBER 2015 nshoremag.com BY MARY GRAUERHOLZ Each year, Andover's Northeast Document Conservation Center restores hundreds of paper-based items to their original state for posterity. Time Savers photographs by Sarah Jordan McCaffery On a crackly fall day, the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) in Andover was buzzing with staff members returning old— and even ancient—paper-based artifacts to a time before human folly and the world's elements had wreaked their damage. Todd Pattison, senior book conser- vator, was showing a newly rebound 15th-century document—its Latin text hand-lettered on parchment and illuminated in gold leaf—owned by a large institutional library. Wallpa- per for a historic house was being reproduced from a dingy remnant under the watchful eye of Terrance D'Ambrosio, director of imaging. Several staff members, including Michael Lee, the director of paper and photograph conservation, were unveiling an enormous bird's-eye in-depth view photo of Andover, marred by the small fingers of children who had scratched into its surface, to assess its repair. (For security reasons, the NEDCC doesn't reveal ownership of its projects while they are still in-house.) Other NEDCC staff members were repairing precious artwork, repro- ducing historic photos, and prepar- ing assessments and trainings for individuals and institutions on how to better care for their collections. Bill Veillette, executive director of NEDCC, says that the hundreds of projects his 40-member staff work on each year are treated with equal care. That's not to say that some projects don't have a special edge of intrigue. "We do lots of projects that are very important," Veillette says. Re- cently, the staff was asked to repair LIVE