april05b.indd


Ann Wheeler 

Preserving
our
cultural
heritage,
one


MSIS
at
a
time


If you’d like nothing better than to pre­pare the next generation of conservators 
to juggle responsibilities as diverse as paper 
conservation, integrated pest management, 
HVAC, and disaster recovery, then being a 
conservation educator might be your job of 
a lifetime. Karen Pavelka is a lecturer and 
conservator at the Uni­
versity of Texas­Austin 
School of Information in 
the Kilgarlin Center for 
Preservation of the Cul­
tural Record. 

The gods must be 
laughing 
Early in the interview, 
I asked Pavelka what 
had led her to become 
a paper conservator. She 
chuckled and replied, “I 
had no intention of be­
ing a paper conservator. 
It was a fluke, the gods 
laughing at me. While I 
was studying for my master’s at Columbia, 
what I really wanted to do was work with 
circulating collections in a large university 
library. 

“For my internship, one of my advisors 
encouraged me to come down here to Texas 
to work at the conservation lab at the [Harry] 
Ransom Center. I thought I was going to work 
in the book lab, but I ended up working in 
the paper lab. It was just life that steered me 
in the direction of paper conservation.” 

Karen Pavelka, lecturer and conserva­
tor at the University of Texas­Austin 
School of Information, at work. 

The hard life of the Texas Declaration 
for Independence 
When I inquired about the most interesting 
piece she had ever worked on, Pavelka an­
swered without hesitation that it was when 
she had treated two copies of the Texas Dec­
laration for Independence. “They were over 

in the University of Texas 
Center for American His­
tory. Both copies had 
been printed on the same 
good quality paper when 
they were first made, but 
both had led hard lives. 
One of them was dark 
brown and held together 
with packing tape. It had 
probably been next to 
something very acidic or 
in very poor storage. The 
project was fascinating 
but a little scary.” 

“It was fun to be able to 
work on it with my [then] 
teaching assistant Rebecca 

Elder, who was at the end of her course 
of studies. While she was at a very mature 
point as a student, she was still facing that 
transition between student and conservator. 
The treatment was taxing as far as the level 
of skills required, yet one of those gratifying 
projects because you know how important it 

Danianne Mizzy is assistant head of the Engineering 
Library at the University of Pennsylvania. Have an idea 
for a “Job of a Lifetime” story? E-mail: danianne@seas. 
upenn.edu. 

292C&RL News April 2005

http:upenn.edu


Lecturer and conservator 
Where: University of Texas­Austin 
School of Information 

For more information, visit: 
www.ischool.utexas.edu/kilgarlin 
/about.php 

is to the history of the State of Texas. And a 
very satisfying result is always nice.” 

Grace under pressure 
Among the qualities Pavelka mentioned as 
important in a conservator were tenacity and 
keeping a cool head. “One of the things we do 
is responding to disasters—going into a library 
that’s under two feet of water and trying to pull 
out as much of the collection as you can. Being 
able to focus on ‘This is the task and the rest of 
my life is on hold,’ that sort of tenacity. It’s as­
tonishing, but it always seems to happen on a 
holiday or at night. I’ve spent several Christmas 
Eves mopping up fl oods.” 

“You also need to have the ability to put 
your emotions on hold when something 
goes wrong. When you’re doing conserva­
tion treatment, at some point you’re going to 
make a mistake and you need to be able to 
concentrate 100 percent of 
your intellectual abilities 
on solving the problem. 
When you have a piece 
of paper under water 
and you first see that ink 
starting to move, even 
though you’ve tested it 
as far as you can possibly 
test it with every means you have, you need 
to pull into play everything you know about 
that ink. Is it dye­based or is it pigment­based, 
because that’s going to effect how you’re go­
ing to remove it from the bath and whether 
you’re going to use a fast method or slow 
method to dry it, a fair amount of pressure or 
no pressure. You’re pulling in all those bits of 
knowledge because your obligation is to the 
artifact. At the same time, what you want to 
do is run into the bathroom, cry, and say ‘I 
never should have gotten into the fi eld and 
by the way, is it still too late to be a waitress?’ 
You have to have that emotional detachment, 
the ability to focus on what’s important and 
then fall apart later.” 

The next generation 
When I asked Pavelka to talk about her move 
from practitioner to teacher, she exclaimed, 

“Teaching is fantastic, I just love it. I teach 
classes in materials studies, in paper conser­
vation treatment, and the protection and care 
of records materials. I started teaching part 
time, just one lab class every semester. It was 
a very intense experience. The students in 
this program have always been high caliber, 
dedicated people who are eager to let you 
push them as far as you possibly can. They 
already have the hand skills. (You need an 
extreme amount of physical control in a fi eld 
like this, so that when you pick a little piece 
of tissue and put it down, it’s going to end 
up where you want it to go.) Interestingly, 
when people are coming into this fi eld they 
assume it’s the level of hand skills that is go­
ing to define how good they are. In fact, it’s 
judgment and a breadth of knowledge which 
will actually make you a conservator rather 
than a technician. The intellectual challenge 

of trying to discover 
what the material in 
front of you is and what 
all the subtleties of each 
individual project are. 
Most of the treatment 
I do now is pushing 
my students into doing 
treatment.” 

There’s nothing better 
Pavelka is passionate about being a conserva­
tor. “It’s so gratifying, being able to help main­
tain the cultural heritage, knowing you’re hav­
ing an effect on how long things are going to 
last and be available to people.” And equally 
so about being an educator. “The students are 
the rewarding part. Seeing the intensity of their 
experience here, seeing how diligently they 
work, how seriously they take the profession. 
Their ideas are just wonderful. Keeping up 
with alumni and hearing about how they’re be­
coming forces in the field and the innovations 
that they are bringing. My goal as an educator 
is for my students to be better and smarter than 
I am. When you see that happening, there’s 
nothing better. You just can’t beat it.” 

I don’t think you can beat a teacher with 
Pavelka’s gifts. 

April 2005  293 C&RL News