Hi, I’m Brittany, and this website is what happens when curiosity refuses to take no for an answer.
I’ve always been drawn to old things. Not because they’re valuable, but because they have stories. A handwritten note tucked inside a book. A family photograph that’s survived for generations. A document that somehow made it through decades of moves, floods, attics, basements, and life.
At some point, that interest led me to the world of conservation.
And then I immediately ran into a wall.’
For a profession dedicated to preserving knowledge, conservation can be surprisingly difficult to learn about from the outside.
Nobody grows up knowing they want to be a conservator because most people don’t even know the profession exists. By the time many of us discover it, we’re already adults trying to figure out how to change directions and enter a field with a very narrow and often confusing path.
The standard answer is simple: get a master’s degree.
The problem is everything that comes before that.
What should you major in?
What experience should you have?
How do you gain that experience when volunteer opportunities are limited and internships often require you to already be enrolled in a degree program?
Ask ten people and you’ll get ten different answers.
I live in New England, surrounded by some of the most respected museums, archives, libraries, and historical institutions in the country. History is everywhere here. Yet despite being in the middle of it all, finding a clear path into conservation often feels like trying to navigate a maze without a map.
After enough dead ends, I realized I was spending as much time figuring out how to learn conservation as I was actually learning it.
So I decided to stop waiting for a roadmap and start making one.
This website is my attempt to document that journey.
Some of what you’ll find here is conservation related. Some of it is collection management, preservation research, book history, archival practices, and digitization projects. Some of it is me building databases because my collection outgrew spreadsheets. Some of it is experimenting, troubleshooting, and occasionally learning things the hard way.
Because let’s be honest, most people interested in preserving historical objects tend to have a few things in common. We’re curious. We’re persistent. We like learning obscure things. And we’re usually at least a little bit crafty.
I’m not a professional conservator.
I’m not an academic.
I’m not writing from a position of expertise.
I’m writing from the perspective of someone trying to figure it out.
This site is a record of what I learn, what works, what doesn’t, and the questions I still haven’t answered. If you’re interested in conservation, preservation, collecting, archives, local history, or you’re simply another person wondering how on earth you’re supposed to break into this field, I hope something here helps.
At the very least, maybe you’ll leave with one less dead end than I did.