The Database of the St. Catherine's Library Conservation Project in Sinai, Egypt

Following my paper, ‘Current use and future development of the database of the St. Catherine’s Library’ [Paper Conservator, Vol. 29] this illustrates the continuation of the work on the development of the database for storing bookbinding data. the information included here is oriented towards the overall methodology of collecting and storing conservation-related data, rather than the more technical aspect of the work. Although less technical, the paper is equally important as it explains how the design of the digital database was affected by the data-collection methodology. The paper illustrates the discussed methodology with the condition survey of the manuscripts from the library of the Saint Catherine Monastery in Sinai, Egypt.
As it is the first time that such detailed conservation data has been collected in a project of that scale (the library holds about 3306 manuscripts), this paper is the first to analyse the traditional paper-based data-collection process in detail. It is the first paper which considers the limitations and the potential problems that are observed when paper-based records are kept, especially because of the flexibility of paper as a means for collecting data and the ease with which alterations on the recording methodology can take place.
This paper and its presentation to Archiving 2005 was a key point in the development of the bookbinding database. Both the acceptance of the paper by the conference which attracts the interest of leading experts in the field of digital archiving and the reflections of the published article by other researchers have helped the current work on the database and have also shown that its conclusions have had an impact on the way conservators approach conservation records. Because of this work the author has been invited to contribute to an EU research proposal about digitisation of ecclesiastical vestibules.