The Conservation Research Centre (CRC) brings together chemists, physicists, biologists, art historians and historians of science and technology. Their work is concerned with objects in museums, archives and libraries, but also with historical monuments, and is aimed in particular at understanding heritage materials and the study of their processes of alteration, as well as the development of preventive and curative conservation methods.
Within the framework of the REMAC project (LabEx PATRIMA), the CRC has worked with the Chartres media library, the IRHT, the Laboratoire Dynamiques Patrimoniales et Culturelles and the Laboratoire d’Optique et Biosciences to develop scientific imaging and image processing techniques that enable historians to read and study manuscripts from Chartres. A second axis consists of developing new imaging and microscopy techniques to visualize the state of degradation of the parchment. Currently the CRC is working with the BM d’Avranches and the CRAHAM on the materials of the manuscripts of Mont-Saint-Michel and is preparing a project on the medieval libraries of Normandy.