AIC's 51st Annual Meeting

Northwestern University Libraries holds a small but historically significant collection of manuscript documents by and about the 19th-century abolitionist, activist, orator, writer, and public intellectual Frederick Douglass. These were treated in 2021 in preparation for digitization. Though the treatment itself was straightforward, the significance and historical nature of the materials made research and analysis vital for informing the treatment decisions. Archival research, along with micro-FTIR analysis of old mending adhesives, was used to decipher the origins of the papers that had been applied to the documents.

The Douglass documents at NUL were previously part of a collection named "African American Documents," which was made up of materials donated to the Libraries in the early 20th century by a private collector who was a patron of the university. The conservation department’s work with this collection required thoughtful consideration of provenance and stewardship, which ultimately led to a reparative description effort led by the Libraries’ Archivist for the Black Experience and an exhibition curated by a PhD student. The exhibition included a description of the conservation process, creating a dialogue around the Libraries’ custodianship of slavery documents.