What is FIXLAB?

1FIXLAB consists in four large scale facilities that give access to conservation scientists, conservators, curators, art historians and archaeologists from Europe and associated countries who want to deepen their studies through appropriate scientific techniques. The involved instruments are divided in two platforms:

• Platform A, located in France, is composed by:

  • AGLAE, the ion beam facility at C2RMF in Palais du Louvre, Paris (see the contributions from J.-C. Dran and C. Pacheco et al. in this issue).

  • IPANEMA, the cultural heritage instrumental platform at synchrotron SOLEIL, Saclay that grants access to all the beamlines of SOLEIL (see L. Bertrand et al. in this issue).

• Platform B, situated in Hungary, gathers:

  • ATOMKI-HAS in Debrecen which gives access to ion beam analyses (see Z. Szikszai et al. in this issue).

  • BNC-WIGNER, that grants access neutron experimental beams at the Budapest Reactor (see Z. Kasztovszky et al. in this issue).

Who can apply for beam time?

How to apply for FIXLAB beam time?

4The FIXLAB Welcome Desk of each facility offers users an integrated accompanying service to assess the proposal relevance, to provide focused technical information on experimental work and feasibility. If required, the facility Welcome Desk can also help the proposer in building a complete work plan.

Calls for proposals

5There are two calls for proposals a year for FIXLAB access. When the call is closed, each facility sends its proposals to its Peer Review Panel (PRP) made of one representative of the facility and three researchers from outside the consortium with an accurate expertise in both the involved analytical techniques and their applications to Cultural Heritage issues.

Selection procedure

6The selection is thus primarily based on the scientific quality, the originality of the scientific proposal, as well as the level of expertise to set up and conduct the proposed experiment and to analyze samples available in the user and host groups.

7The PRPs assess the proposals remotely, assigning each proposal a grade and ranking them. Priority is given to collaborative projects promoting new methodology, technology transfer and scientific advancement. Users who have not previously used the FIXLAB resources or working in countries where no such facilities exist are privileged and researches with excellent scientific bases with focused goals as well as proposals technically feasible by the host facilities are also priorities.

8Depending on the range they obtained, the proposals are classified as “high priority”, “priority”, “to be re-submitted” and “rejected”. The facility Welcome Desk allocates the number of beam time units to the selected proposals and informs all the users about the results of the selection for their own proposal.

Users’ duties

9In return, among other duties, the users are requested to provide a Project Summary Report (User Report) to be submitted to the concerned access facility and to fill-in the European Commission User Group Questionnaire available on-line. Publications must acknowledge the support by the European Commission.

Overview of the FIXLAB activity during the CHARISMA program

10Nine calls have been made during the CHARISMA program, receiving 174 proposals from 20 countries. Access has been given to 138 projects, meaning that the rejection rate is of 20%, and 242 users from 20 countries could travel to the large scale instruments. As shown on figure 2, the countries that most benefited from FIXLAB transnational access are Italy, United Kingdom, Romania, Belgium and Germany.

11The projects were covering very various materials, periods and issues, as shown on figure 3. As a matter of fact, the studied materials are mostly inorganic, the most represented being metals, stones, glass and ceramics. The concerned periods go back to Paleolithic down to 19th century in quite a balanced way, the 20th-21st centuries’ materials being mostly mock-up samples for conservation questions. The issues tackled by the different FIXLAB accesses can be gathered in 5 groups, from the highest numbers of projects to the lowest:

• provenance or trade routes of a material in a given geo-chronological context. The case study described in this issue by B. Constantinescu et al. is focused on provenance of Romanian prehistoric bronze artifacts.

• manufacturing techniques (compositions, recipes, clues of making process or chaîne opératoire…). The productions of ancient faience from Naukratis and Rhodes are compared by A. Meek et al. in this issue.

• conservation and/or restoration (understanding of degradation processes, effect of a restoration product on a specific material…). Three studies related to this topic are described hereafter and, for all of them, mock-up samples had to be synthesized following ancient recipes and analyzed. One deals with medieval colored gold (see A. Crabbé et al.), another concerns colored 19th-century Northern-American quillwork (see L. Troalen et al.) and the last one focuses on European 16th-18th-centuries gilt leather (see L. Robinet et al.).

• materials holding information directly linked to the climate and/or environment in which they evolve.

• accurate physic-chemical analysis of materials providing precious information to optimize their dating.

12The results obtained in the framework of the FIXLAB transnational access already gave birth to more than 80 papers or communications in a national or international conference. Regarding the big amount of data generated by a run (data quantity which drastically increases with the development of imaging, see C. Pacheco et al. in this issue), some data treatments and interpretations are still on-going. Many publications on CHARISMA studies will surely come out soon.

Conclusion

13The FIXLAB transnational access has been a success, enabling the European community of Cultural Heritage scientists to access large scale facilities for various materials, periods and issues.

14However, the drawbacks emitted by the four beam time providers deal with the difficulty to get the experiment reports from all the users, the collection of proposals at the infrastructure level which did not encourage multi-access and the lack of means in the CHARISMA frame to develop methodologies and instruments to improve FIXLAB transnational access.

15It must be emphasized that if most of the FIXLAB accesses were interlocking in wider projects, it sometimes gave birth to fruitful collaborations between the users and the host teams. Multiple access could also create a synergy between the facilities and the users, as illustrated by the research project on gilt leather by L. Robinet et al. in this issue. The research has been jointly carried out at AGLAE and IPANEMA-SOLEIL and was the beginning of an innovative wider research program.

17In the future, the four facilities will work together to establish a unique selection procedure, enabling a better communication between them, a harmonization of the selection criteria and make multiple access easier. In the framework of IPERION CH, the four infrastructures will participate to a joint research activity on five main points: development of non-linear imaging microscopy, conception and development of a dynamic and safe sample/object holder that will enable mapping of 3D objects, mitigation of the risk of material modification induced by the beam, strategies for diagnostics of conservation treatments and digital data management, especially for mapping. The aim of such an activity is to improve the access for the users and to develop both instruments and methods so as to foresee the future reachable information beyond the current limits.

The staffs of the four facilities are to be warmly thanked for the scientific and technical support: F. Decuq, Q. Lemasson, B. Moignard, L. Pichon, L. Bertrand, M. Thoury, S. Cohen, W. Josse, M.-A. Languille, S. Schoeder, F. Deschamps, P. Cook, L. Montuelle, P. Gueriau, R. Oprandi-Legorre, T. Severin-Fabiani, A. Vichi, Z. Szikszai, Z. Kertesz, L. Rosta, E. Mitcsenkov-Horváth, Z. Kasztovszky, Z. Kis, B. Maróti, A. Len, G. Káli, Z. Szőkefalvi-Nagy, I. Kovács.
The Peer Review Panels are also ackowledged for the evaluations of the proposals: H. E. Mahnke, S. Zucchiatti, A. G. Karydas, L. Beck, F. Farges, T. Pradell, L. Robbiola, G. Sarret, P. Trocellier, A. Voegelin, M. Wilke, R. Van Lang, G. Querré, K.Harva, A. Denker, V. Szeverényi. K. Biró, E. Godfrey, J. Räisänen, G. Pépy.