Ligatus news

TECHNE AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award

TECHNE AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award - Announcement

Ligatus, University of the Arts London and The National Archives
Invitation for PhD applications

Project Title: Observing uncertainty: ambiguity in conservation documentation and its implications for the care of collections

Location: London


Over the past few weeks Kristen and I have been busy progressing with a number of tasks for the project. Kristen is preparing an update for the consortium. One of these tasks is setting up the project website. It is no secret that I am a big fan of Drupal. The Ligatus website has been running Drupal since (if I remember correctly) version 5. It has been setup as a multi-site running on the same code base.


As Kristen and I have been looking into sending the announcement for the project out, some colleagues have asked for visual material to accompany the text. This is a bit difficult given that the project has hardly started and that the consortium will not physically meet until June. So we opted for a project logo.

With limited experience in design and even more limited time we decided on a simple logo which will give the right message for the purposes of the announcement. The two components are:


Last year, with the help of Gareth Johnson and David Cross we prepared a short video showcasing Artivity and explaining its use in under a minute. The video features artwork by Gino Ballantyne. We are publishing this video today to kick start another round of work on Artivity to collect some more data and test the installation process and data exporting capabilities.


I have recently worked on a one-year pilot for Linked Data at the University of Oxford. During this pilot I kept coming up to database design decisions which made publishing Linked Data difficult. This page includes some points to consider when designing your database:

Basic guide for database design

To assist work for Linked Data, when designing a database, please observe the following:


We are happy to announce that our crowdfunding appeal had raised over £11,000. The money will be used to employ a project assistant in Oxford next year to continue the work on the Clarkson Slide Archive Project. we would like to thank all of our donors for their extraordinary generosity and let you know that any further donations will always be welcomed!

Please watch this space for more updates.


This is the early sixteenth-century binding from the flooded stacks of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence that fired Chris Clarkson’s interest in the laced-case limp parchment binding as a conservation structure. The thickness of the goatskin parchment cover, the lacing of all the slips along both joints and a substantial sewing structure on double alum-tawed sewing supports with structural endbands created a structure that survived not only more than four centuries of use but also saturation with water followed by drying.

Nicholas Pickwoad


Dried books from the book stacks of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence following the disastrous floods of 1966, waiting to be assessed for repair by Chris Clarkson and Tony Cains in 1967.

By Nicholas Pickwoad


A row of buildings supported by wooden buttresses after the floods in Florence in November 1966, on the east side of the Piazza dei Ciompi, looking along the Borgo Allegri towards the church of Santa Croce, photographed by Chris Clarkson in 1967.

By Nicholas Pickwoad