Maria Fredericks
Maria Fredericks, Drue Heinz Book Conservator at the Morgan Library & Museum, will give the lecture “Rare Books as Museum Objects: Considerations for Safe Exhibition and Loan” on Thursday, March 23, from 4:30–6 p.m. in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons in Bird Library. The event is the 2017 offering in the annual Brodsky Series for the Advancement of Library Conservation.
The lecture will be preceded by a hands-on workshop from 2 -3:30p.m. in the Lemke Seminar Room, Special Collections Research Center, sixth floor of Bird Library. The workshop, Exploring Microclimates, will introduce participants to a variety of materials and techniques for providing a safe and stable environment for the exhibition, travel, and storage of artifacts.
Fredericks will discuss the basics of sealed packages and monitoring devices for maintaining a stable relative humidity around artifacts in transit or on display, and the use of pollutant scavengers to mitigate the effects of certain indoor pollutants inside a display case or storage container. The lecture is open to the public, however there is limited space available for the workshop; R.S.V.P. to jschambe@syr.edu.
Fredericks is the Drue Heinz Book Conservator in the Thaw Conservation Center of the Morgan Library & Museum. In addition to ongoing conservation treatment work and supervision of interns and post-graduate fellows, Fredericks devotes a substantial portion of her time to evaluating and preparing bound materials for display and travel in the Morgan’s exhibitions and loan program. She is also a visiting lecturer at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center, and is a frequent speaker and teacher. Before joining the staff of the Morgan in 2005, she was head of conservation at Columbia University Libraries. She has also held positions at the Huntington Library, the Winterthur Library, the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts and the Library of Congress.
