[NHCOLL-L:3015] RE: Conservation of Blaschka glass models

[Julia Sigwart]

Dear all,

Thank you Jane for mentioning our meeting, the Dublin Blaschka Congress.

We will host the first-ever international meeting focussed on the 
Blaschkas and other historical glass models of zoological and 
botanical specimens, next September. The keynote speakers will 
include Susan Rossi-Wilcox (Harvard) and David Whitehouse (Corning) 
and other Blaschka scholars. The programme includes limited space for 
contributed talks and posters, and technical proceedings will be 
published after the conference in the journal "Historical Biology".

This meeting has been born out of the realisation that everyone, 
everywhere, is confused and often terrified by Blaschka models, and 
only by getting various interested parties together will we be able 
to figure out what to do with them. Everyone loves them, everyone 
knows they make gorgeous exhibits (or would, if we could only fix 
them). But their conservation is often particularly tricky, and 
perhaps it is more tricky because the vast majority are held in 
science collections away from the skills of glass art conservators. 
My motivation is either altruistic or selfish: the joint 
museum/university programme that I run collectively holds about 750 
zoological models, and there are more than 200 more in other 
university collections in Ireland.

We do expect to have a focus session during the conference to put 
conservators in touch with collections and vice versa. A chance to 
pick the brains of the experts-- consider it money saved when you pay 
a contract glass conservator!

The early registration deadline (i.e. cheap rate, and abstract 
deadline) for the conference is at the beginning of May. See you in 
Dublin!
http://www.ucd.ie/blaschka

Cheers,

Julia

--
Collections-based Biology in Dublin
National Museum of Ireland &
University College Dublin
http://www.ucd.ie/zoology/museum