The Hewitt Sisters’ Diaries: Conservation and Digitization Behind-the-Scenes

The Hewitt Sisters’ Diaries: Conservation and Digitization Behind-the-Scenes

This post was written by
Katie Wagner, Senior Book Conservator, David Holbert, Digital Imaging Specialist, and Jacqueline E. Chapman, Head, Digital Library and Digitization. Learn more about the diaries of the Hewitt Sisters in
a previous post by Jennifer Cohlman Bracchi
.
In February 2020 the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives was awarded an American Women’s History Initiative grant to conserve and stabilize the
23 diaries kept by the Hewitt sisters
during their travels. These diaries would eventually be featured in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s exhibition,
Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt: Designing a Modern Museum
.
To support their long-term preservation, research use, and future exhibition, the diaries would be stabilized and rehoused by a contractor focused exclusively on this detailed conservation work. Afterwards, the items would be digitized by our Digitization team to provide broad access and to prevent unnecessary handling of the fragile objects.
Left: A Hewitt Sisters’ diary binder, displayed closed prior to treatment. Right: A Hewitt Sisters’ diary binder, displayed open prior to treatment
What started as an exciting and straightforward project for a contractor to work on-site alongside our Preservation team, became a more challenging operation when just a month later pandemic safety protocols came into place.
To complicate matters, prior to the pandemic, six of the 23 volumes had already been sent from their usual location at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library in New York City, to our Book Conservation Lab (BCL) in Landover, MD in preparation for the exhibition. With the closure of our on-site facilities during the pandemic, retrieving and relocating the remaining volumes to the BCL was not immediately possible.
The decision was made to hire two contractors, one near the Landover location and one in New York, to conserve the diaries in their own studios, prioritizing the six diaries needed for the exhibition. The complex physical nature of these diaries demanded an innovative approach to rehousing them to maintain the integrity of the original format.
Left: An example of ephemera found in one of the diaries, prior to treatment. Right: A calling card found in a diary, prior to treatment
Most of the diaries were housed in commercial two-ring binders covered in leather that had degraded over time. Covers were detached, and in some cases, missing. The diaries included many scraps of ephemera from acidic newspaper clippings to calling cards, to sketches. The inclusion of these items caused some of the binders to become overfilled leading to detached pages.
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives conservators worked closely with the contractors to ensure that both the pages and the ephemeral pieces maintained their original order for research purposes, preserving both the physical pages and pieces as well as the intellectual content an…