Friends of the John Rylands

CAROLINE CHECKLEY-SCOTT is currently Collection Care Manager at the John Rylands Library.  She is an accredited member of ICON and Chair of Book and Paper for ICON. Caroline lectures both nationally and internationally and currently acts as consultant for the National Library Cairo. Her career has included work at such prestigious institutions as the British Library, the Wellcome Library, the House of Lords and the Oriental and India Office Library and Records, where she specialised in the conservation of early Christian manuscripts from the Middle East. One of her current specialist research fields is the DNA of paper.

Drawing on this rich experience Caroline will explain the characteristic features of the Christian texts of the Syriac Church of Antioch (the Syriac book), including sewing, board preparation, text block attachment, lining, endbanding, covering and decoration along with considerations which bear on their long term preservation.