Preservation Beat

Friday, January 30, 2009

On Tuesday February 3, 2009,  we will be returning the first finished round of artifacts to the African American Museum. This will include baskets, gourds, feathered fans, sandals, a beaded necklace, a syrup tin, a box of buttons from a local dry cleaner and many other objects. It will be a landmark in the progress we have been making. With so many projects happening simultaneously it is nice to be able to see what we have accomplished so far and to be able to send these artifacts home to their museum.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Since all the cleaned items will be off to their home, I am taking today and tomorrow to box them up for travel, and also future protection. It is so pleasing to see these items we have lived with snuggled in new boxes, waiting to be picked up. Making the clamshell boxes out of the blue board is also a nice break from what seems like constant cleaning. Some of the items, like the feathered fans, will share housing, but the baskets will be happiest in sturdy boxes by themselves. It will help us, with space (and hopefully the African American Museum, too, that’s the idea), as we can stack boxes, but not items. This was Nancy’s idea, after noticing that the items that had been properly housed prior to the flood fared much better than unhoused, or ill housed, items. 

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

In 2007, School of Library and Information Science Preservation students Laura Guth, Sally Myers, and Kris Wiley prepared a preservation plan for the oversize collection of about 550 books at the University of Iowa Art Library. The plan called for sending a small number of items to Book Repair each week. In addition to any repair work, those items needing additional support and protection were to be sent on to the Conservation Lab. We implemented this plan late 2007.

Since making boxes of this size is hard on the hands and elbows, Linda Lundy makes only 1-2 a week. This means that we make slow but steady progress on this project. LInda has constructed 76 boxes so far.

Even though the Art Library is closed due to damage to the building during the June floods, staff are still retrieving for patron use. During these trips to the Art Library, items from the oversized area are pulled and forwarded to preservation. One piece sent over was: fNA280.W54 Atlas, Die Archaische Poros-Architekure der Akropolis zu Athen. The piece measured 17 3/8” wide by 23 ½” long. By the time the box was made, it measured 18 3/8” wide by 25” long. The preservation box enclosure will protect the piece from further damage by light, moisture and dust and will keep the piece sitting straight on the shelf.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Librarian Anne Shelley brought down a box of soon to be digitized LPs with the request that we clean them. We were happy to do so, as it would give us a chance to make sure that our dish drainer could convert itself into an LP drying rack. I set up the sink with two trays, one with water and a bit of photoflo for washing and a second “water only tray” for rinsing. I removed the LPs from their jackets and swabbed the labels to make sure that none would run in the water–only two seemed ready to run. I then quickly dipped the LPs in the wash, brushing them gently with a soft (tsukemawashibake) brush, one that we normally use for paste linings. I then propped them on the drying rack, perfectly sized for an LP, and let them dry for a short period. Next, I brushed them dry with a microfiber brush designed for vinyl records. Each record then got slipped back into its cover, with a new polyethelene sleeve for protection. This should remove any dust and greasy fingerprints from the surface that might otherwise interfere with the digitization.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Here is another Civil War letter similar to the one posted below, only here the additional challenges were that the letter required some flattening of the wrinkles and folds before mending and the repair tissue had to be tinted.

This letter was pressed overnight between moistened blotter paper to flatten it.

Then the Walters repair tissue was tinted to match the original.  The tissue was brushed with a thin wash of acrylic paint and allowed to dry overnight on polyester sheet.

Once the tissue dries, mending proceeds as before.

To see a scan of the completed work in our digital collection, click here:

http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/u?/cwd,5138

Friday, January 16, 2009

Today was the grand re-opening of the African American Museum of Iowa. A feat to be commended and celebrated. Since the June flooding, they have mucked out their building and restored it sufficiently to have staff back in the building, the beginnings of a museum store, and an exhibit installed. While doing all of the this, they also continued all their statewide programming and facilitated flood recovery work of the damaged collections. There’s much to be done but they have a great start.

Here are some photos of the grand re-opening along side the same area the day we entered the building to inspect for flood damage. The re-opening photos were provided by the AAMI.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

One of the collections that the department is currently digitizing is a collection of letters and diaries relating to the Civil War.  While most are in good condition, a few are so torn that they require considerable mending before they can be scanned. 

For our mending, we use Walters repair tissue which we have previously prepared.  It is made by brushing adhesive (half paste, half methylcellulose) in a thin layer onto kozo repair tissue which is then layed down on a sheet of polyester and allowed to dry. 

 For mending tears, small strips of the Walters tissue are torn from the sheet using a needle tear or a water brush tear.  The strips are positioned over the tear with the dried adhesive side down and reactivated using a moist cotton swab or water brush.  They then dry under blotter or Remay and small weights.  Infills are treated similarly, with patches adhered to the edges of both sides of the paper loss.

To see the finished product, scanned and uploaded into our digital collection click here:

http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/u?/cwd,5134

Monday, January 12, 2009

These photographs were found among the documents from the African American Museum that were returned from the freeze dryer. This is one example of many envelopes full of photographs. These photographs were interleaved with sheets of archival paper which were adhered to the photographs when they were immersed by the flood. At a glance it looked like there was little hope of removing the paper from the pictures without damaging them. 

We took a couple of examples to the University of Iowa Photo Department where we were advised to try and wet the photos again to remove the paper. When we returned to the Conservation lab I put one of the photos in a bath of water with photoflo and left it there for about ten minutes. When I came back the paper had floated off and the photo had sunk to the bottom of the tray. As you can see, some of the emulsion adhered to the interleaving but the pictures are mostly intact.

I then let the photos drain vertically for a few minutes to get most of the water off so there wouldn’t be droplets and puddles on them when they were set out to dry. I set them out on our drying rack and let them dry overnight. In the morning I found them to be warped and curling which was to be expected after the aqueous treatment. I put the photos in between sheets of silicon release paper and put them in the dry mount press under medium heat. I left them for about 15 minutes and they came out almost perfectly flat. I then left them under weight for 24 hours and they are now perfectly flat.

If there had been no interleaving, these photographs would have been cemented together, never to be separated and none of this would have been possible. Thanks to the good preservation practices of this museum this photo collection will be salvaged.

Friday, January 9, 2009

We have started on the covers, finally. After Caitlin and Nancy worked out the prototype, and found and ordered the proper plastic sleeves for the job, we just have to start digging in and doing the work. It makes the most sense to work on a box at a time, to get a bit of a assembly-line thing going. I first separate the dirty cardboard supports from the sheets with the printed images; sometimes these slip off easily, others require considerable coaxing. Once the entire box is free if its smelly cardboards, I begin dry cleaning each cover with a dusting of gound eraser crumbs, lightly massaging the surface to pick up the dirt. A good bit of it flakes off, but so far there has still been staining after dry cleaning. We did the 45s first, and Gary recommended we swipe the still dirty areas lightly with cotton dampened with vulpex and water. This seems to remove some staining, but I do test the inks for colorfastness. I have done two boxes so far this way, and Caitlin has taken over flattening them, since she really wanted an excuse to use the fancy sealer. After they are all clean and flat, I can slide them into the sleeve with the new .20 three flap supports. And then we coo at them, because they are finished and pretty.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Our close proximity to the museums we are working with gives us the advantage of easy communication with their curators. Leigh Ann Randak of the Johnson County Historical Society was able to come down to see how our Head Conservator, Gary Frost, was coming along with the ledgers and county registers he had been working on. Being able to see what is being done gave her a better idea of how long things would take and how complicated the process would be. When figuring out how much money you have relative to saving a collection it makes all the difference to know exactly what is being done and to have the option to say, “this book wiill take 6 hours to fix and it’s not worth the money when we could replace it and save three others in that time for that amount of money”. Leigh Ann has been able to come down multiple times to go through the books and manuscripts to decide what we should work on and what can be replaced or let go.

The ledger shown in this photograph was already taken apart and was in loose sheets when we got it. Gary used the “double fan” method to bind the pages together using a very thin layer of adhesive on the spine before re-casing it into a new buckram cover.