Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler is an American archivist who has served as the Chief of the Conservation Laboratory at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) since 1985.

Education

Ritzenthaler received her undergraduate degree in English from

Wayne State University Wayne State University (WSU) is a public research university in Detroit, Michigan. It is Michigan's third-largest university. Founded in 1868, Wayne State consists of 13 schools and colleges offering approximately 350 programs to nearly 25,000 ...

. She also attended Wayne State for her Master's in Library Science, with a concentration in archives administration.

Career

Ritzenthaler has served as the Chief of the Conservation Laboratory at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) since 1985. She worked for the

Society of American Archivists The Society of American Archivists is the oldest and largest archivist association in North America, serving the educational and informational needs of more than 5,000 individual archivist and institutional members. Established in 1936, the org ...

(SAA) and the University of Illinois-Chicago. She has written extensively, as well as lectured throughout the United States, on archives preservation. Many of her lectures focused on techniques to preserve family photos, recipes, books and other papers. Her most well-known works are ''Preserving Archives and Manuscripts'' and ''Photographs: Archival Care and Management'', both of which were published through the

. From 1999-2003, Ritzenthaler led the conservation team that treated and re-encased the

Charters of Freedom The term Charters of Freedom is used to describe the three documents in early American history which are considered instrumental to its founding and philosophy. These documents are the United States Declaration of Independence, the Constitution ...

(the

Declaration of Independence A declaration of independence or declaration of statehood or proclamation of independence is an assertion by a polity in a defined territory that it is independent and constitutes a state. Such places are usually declared from part or all of th ...

, the

Constitution A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organisation or other type of entity and commonly determine how that entity is to be governed. When these pr ...

, and the

Bill of Rights A bill of rights, sometimes called a declaration of rights or a charter of rights, is a list of the most important rights to the citizens of a country. The purpose is to protect those rights against infringement from public officials and pr ...

). She was the last person to touch the Declaration of Independence before it was re-cased. She retired from the National Archives in 2016 after serving over 30 years in archives preservation and conservation.

Publications

* Preserving Archives and Manuscripts (2010) * Photographs : Archival Care and Management (2006) * Archives and Manuscripts : Administration of Photo Collections (1984) * Archives and Manuscripts : Conservation (1983)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ritzenthaler, Mary Lynn Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American archivists Female archivists Wayne State University alumni University of Illinois Chicago faculty National Archives and Records Administration