Lois Olcott Price
Director of Conservation, Senior Conservator of Library Collections and Adjunct Assistant Professor
Lois Olcott Price, Senior Conservator of Library Collections and Adjunct Assistant Professor, graduated cum laude with a major in history from Connecticut College in 1971. After completing her M.A. in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture she worked for The Magazine Antiques and served as Director of Museum Planning for the Filson Club in Louisville, KY. In 1980 she completed her M.S. in WUDPAC majoring in paper conservation and interning at the Library of Congress. For the next 13 years she worked at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, a non-profit regional center in Philadelphia, rising to the position of senior conservator responsible for the treatment of all library and archival materials. In 1986 she also assumed responsibility for co-managing the laboratory which involved training interns, apprentices and technicians, performing and supervising conservation surveys, and designing and conducting educational programs. In 1994, Price became Conservator of Library Collections for the Winterthur Museum where she is responsible for all conservation activities in an 85,000-volume special collections library and for teaching in both the WUDPAC and WPEAC programs. In 2007 she became Director of Conservation at Winterthur, assuming responsibility for supervising a staff of 24 conservators and support staff and for promoting conservation activities and education throughout the institution and in the larger community.
She has lectured, consulted, and published widely on issues related to library and archival conservation, reviewed grants for NEH, IMS and NHPRC, and served as project director for several NEH and IMLS funded programs. Since 1991, she has pursued a long-standing research interest on the fabrication and preservation of American architectural drawings. In support of her research she has received several grants and will publish a monograph on her work in 2008.
