Conserving the Chew Family Papers

A large portion of the yet untouched Chew Family Papers are maps, which have been collecting dust in rolls for years and years. Although bagged and labeled, the rolled documents need to be individually evaluated for conservation purposes. Cathleen and I spent hours last week carefully unrolling and looking at a variety of documents: printed maps, hand-drawn maps, blueprints, advertisments... All are oversized (i.e. too large for the preferred storage location of flat files), as seen in the following photographic documentation:




Look forward to posts on the conservation of these large maps, which will prove to be interesting, I'm sure!