Preservation Beat

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

     A UI prof and grad student were interested in getting a digital copy of Cursus Literaturae Sinicae, a 19th C. translation of classical Chinese texts into Latin in five volumes.  When the volumes came via ILL from Notre Dame, they were scanned using the overhead scanner with the gradation curve set to give as white a background as possible, since it was determined that we should also print out a copy of the scans and bind them for our own circulating collection.  Here’s what they look like.

     The sheets from the printer were perfect bound with the double fan press.  To account for the swelling in such large volumes we decided the backs should be rounded, which was accomplished with the aid of a couple of cardboard map tubes at the fore edge.

For the first volume (at left above) only three spine linings were used: kozo, acrylic/cotton super, paper.  As this volume had a lot of throw up, subsequent volumes got additional linings: kozo/cotton super/paper/cotton/paper, which worked better.  Hopefully they will stand up well to frequent use.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Today the University of Iowa Collections Coalition http://www.uiowa.edu/~collect/ went to the Iowa State Fair. We staged mock disaster recovery drills from 9AM until 3PM. Our message was that there is a strong likelihood that you can save your stuff even if it’s all grimy and wet. We invited people to participate. Several kids stepped up to the plate while the adults watched and listened. A few commented that they “wished they had known about this last year.”

It was messy but fun. We had one “pool” of muddy water and separate buckets for dunking books and photos and CDs. The books had had it by the end of the day from all the endless dunking and sometimes less than gentle treatment from participants. The photographs and CDs were still intact as were all the fake bugs and snakes thrown in for a little drama.

In addition to participating in the drill, kids lined up for a free tatoo.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Ongoing efforts to clean and flatten flood-affected archives manuscripts from the African American Museum of Iowa have turned up yet another form of adherograph deterioration. (See June 30, 2009 entry)

As seen in the example to the left, the powder medium that holds the adherograph text image has irreversibly adhered to the back of a preceding document page.  Unable to separate the two, I decided to scan both pieces of the damaged document and then attempt to reunite them in Photoshop.

The first step was to flip the fragment horizontally.  Though only the back of the reversed fragment text was visible through the adherograph medium, flipping it over digitally created a faint, though workable positive. 

Note the altered color of the reunited fragment.  Through a haphazard process of tweaking color levels and saturations I was able to pull the text out, making it as legible as possible.  After doing so, reducing the image from color to black and white serves to isolate the information from the discolored document carrier.

 This detail, captured after converting document to black and white, shows that while the texture of the adherograph medium remains cumbersome, the information is again legible. 

This second example details another completed document as well as its original post-flood condition.  While this process is probably too time consuming in many situations, experimenting with the procedure was a valuable experience.  Not only is there now a workflow for this in the future, but it also raises some interesting questions about disaster recovery, institutional resources, and policies pertaining to discarding and reformatting.