ARAs Archive Conservation Training Scheme consists of work placements in various archives across the country, and students receive one-to-one tuition from their instructors. Students get to learn both in depth theory and develop their practical bench skills, as well as gain an insight into how other institutions function and meet many new people in the archive sector.
The scheme is a fantastic way to train the 'Next Generation' of conservators by passing on knowledge, building connections, and developing 'Innovation and Imagination in Record Keeping'.

The Latymer Upper School Conservation Project was organised by Codex Conservation Ltd, and is an example of how to make paid internships enable prohibitively expensive projects. We will describe how the project was set up, then we will outline the conservation of one the bindings and the approach taken.
This school archive contains nearly 2 dozen manuscripts, charting the school's history. The bindings conserved are unique manuscripts with exceptional eighteenth-century bindings. Their conservation was an essential part of their 400th celebrations. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of the books had been so damaged by mould that they required a huge amount of time to enable handling and digitisation. A plan was developed to enable the preservation of all of the volumes, and the remedial treatment of the worst affected over several years, including flexible, funded internships for emerging conservators. The interns have documented and manageed the project, as well as performing the conservation treatments and presenting their work to the school community.
In the second part of the presentation, we will describe the approach taken to deal with complex mould damaged material. Every page was treated to arrest the mould infestation, and required repair before reuse. All elements of the bindings were reused after careful treatment and reconstruction. This included resizing, paper repair, pressing, and reconstructing the sewing to enable the reuse of the repaired binding.

The conservation team at West Yorkshire Archive Service was approached by a decorating partnership specialising in the installation, restoration and reproduction of historic moulded wallpapers, for training in paper conservation techniques to support their practice.

Following a collaborative process, a short series of successful workshops was designed to fulfil both the requirements of the learners and respect the professional boundaries of the trainers.

This presentation will reflect on the challenges and benefits of sharing skills across specialisms and beyond conservation into the realms of restoration. And in an information age, to what extent and how, should we as conservation professionals be gatekeepers of our knowledge and skills?