The Foundation of the Conservation Laboratory

The Conservation Laboratory was opened on 29 May 1974 by the Provost, A. J. McConnell. Michael Viney’s report in the Irish Times mentioned that the technical director was Anthony Cains, and that Sir Frank Francis, the former director of the British Museum, spoke of the changes that had led to the conviction that the conservation of books and manuscripts should be taken as seriously as conservation in ‘the fine arts’ (Simmons, 1978). There are fuller accounts of Francis’s speech in the papers of the Conservation Laboratory itself, a collection consisting mainly of Cains’s papers. Francis’s most topical point was that the flooding of the Arno in 1966, when mud and water damaged over a million volumes in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, revealed the shortcomings of conservation techniques: there was a ‘distressing’ lack of information on how to treat damaged books, little was known about the historical development of ‘book structure’, and ‘there was also a lack of universal acceptance of standards on the individual stages of restoration’. Cains had been Technical Director of Conservation at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze from 1967 to 1972, where he had supervised a staff of ninety. The Keeper of Manuscripts, William O’Sullivan, who was not mentioned in Viney’s report, went over much the same ground as Francis in an article in Trinity Trust News; he described how he had gone to see Cains in Florence after the flood: