Digitizing the materiality[-ies] of books. The [potential] role of the conservator

Abstract

The successful transmediation of books and documents through digitization requires the synergetic partnership of many professional figures that have what may sometimes appear as conflicting goals at heart. On one side, there are those who look after the physical objects and strive to preserve them for the future generations—conservators and curators— and on the other those involved in the digitization of the objects, the information that they contain, and the management of the digital data—digitization professionals, and then digital humanists. These complementary activities are generally considered as separate. More often than not, conservation is presented as ancillary to digitization, with the role of the conservator restricted to the preparation of items for scanning, with no input into the digital product. By understanding the informational content of books as objects and the role that conservators could have in the creation of broader digital products and tools, on the one hand, and, on the other, the transformative and transcendent value that digital surrogates can and should bring to the table we can aim at producing digital products that balance the importance of the original object, while also keeping in mind the merit and enhancing nature of digital surrogates (and how these can also help the conservator).

Bio

Alberto Campagnolo trained as a book conservator at the European Course for Conservators/Restorers of Book Materials (1998-2001) in Spoleto, Italy and has worked in that capacity in various institutions, amongst which the National Museum Wales, London Metropolitan Archives, St. Catherine’s Monastery (Egypt), and the Vatican Library. He studied Conservation of Library and Archive Materials (2001-2006) at Ca’ Foscari University Venice, Italy and then read for an MA in Digital Culture and Technology (2007-2009) at King’s College London. He pursued a PhD (2010-2015) on an automated visualization of historical bookbinding structures at the Ligatus Research Centre (University of the Arts, London). He is an adjunct professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Udine, Italy (2018-ongoing). Alberto has been collaborating (2013-ongoing) with Dot Porter (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania) on VisColl, a modelling and visualization tool for the gathering structure of books in codex format. Since 2018 he has been an acting member of the IADA board. He has been part of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Paper Conservation since 2016, and he is now co-editor in-Chief with Aurélie Martin.