Preservation Beat

Monday, November 2, 2009

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute students spent two Mondays making a post-bound photo album in the University of Iowa Libraries conservation lab guided by preservation assistant Bill Voss and two Mondays with preservation librarian Nancy E Kraft learning about digital photo layout.

Although most of the material was pre-cut, there was still much to do to put an album together. The OLLI students learned a about paper grain, paste, and mitering corners and experiened some of the challenges of a conservator during their class. They also learned a little about digital photograph preservation and tested the stability of their digital photos by soaking them in water for a few hours.

These photo albums can be used for traditional or digital photos.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Finally sending some ledgers home!! Leigh Ann Randak came to the Conservation Lab today to pick up 42 finished ledgers and the completed collection of re-boxed court dockets!!

This means we are nearly half way through the ledger project and that we’re making progress! Many of these projects are so long that it is hard to gauge our progress so when we can send things back to their museums it is very satisfying. The ledgers are mainly record books from the Johnson County Historical Society. Many of these books are enormous and in addition to the satisfaction of having them finished, it will be helpful to have the extra space. Now we just have to get those LP’s sent home.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

One of our volunteers has taken on the project of building custom boxes for objects to be returned to the African American Museum in November. Beth has been teaching Kallie Holt how to make boxes from the sturdy blue corrugated board we use routinely in the conservation lab.  In addition to making them easily transportable the boxes will be good for long term storage for these artifacts.

One of the advantages of our close communication with the curators is the ability to have us prioritize items. Susan Kuecker of the African American Museum is opening an exhibit in November and sent us a list of objects she needed so we could re-arrange our workflow. These are the objects that Kallie is re-boxing.  We hope to have a majority of the items from the African American Museum treated, boxed, and ready to go by December.

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.

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.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

This Marriage Certificate arrived at the Conservation Lab tightly rolled in a tube. It was in two torn halves, somewhat soiled and quite tattered along the edges with some degree of loss particularly along the right margin.

The treatment that followed included a gentle humidification and flattening, followed by dry cleaning using Minter eraser crumbs and Absorbene sponge eraser. Kristin secured strategic bridge mends of tenjugo along the major tear to insure proper matching of scarfed edges, and then lined the entire certificate onto a medium-lightweight Korean handmade paper. The lining enforced an additional gentle flattening of the certificate and countered it’s tendency to curl.

Once the lining was dry and the certificate flat, Kristin createdcustom-tinted double layer/sandwich infills for areas of loss. A thicker more fibrous paper was used for the bulk of the infills (to echo the thickness of the certificate) and was thin sekishu-gampi was then adhere along the top of the infill (to echo the calendared sheen of the original paper). Custom color tinting was achieved post-mends, using acrylics and a “dry-swab” technique.

Text provided by Kristin A Baum.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

This weekend I’ve started working with the Johnson County Historical Society book collection. So far they have required some dry cleaning, mending and flattening. I’ve been using the vacuum packer to flatten them which has been very effective and is really fun to watch. The damage is similar to that of the ledgers but since the books are smaller it goes a little faster. We still have a yearbook collection and the rest of the ledgers to do so I’m not going to run out of books anytime soon!

Thursday, July 16, 2009

 
We have been experimenting with a fancy new vacuum packer, generally used for food preservation. We are using it to flatten books and other paper items. It would be inefficient for batch work because of all the material that needs to be cut to size but for especially warped books it is very effective. 

We cut blotter pieces, card, and book board all to size.  All of the interleaving material must be cut to the size of the book so that the edges don’t interfere with the sealing of the bag. The inside of the book is lightly misted, and the blotter sheets placed inside.  The book is sandwiched between pieces of blotter, card, and book board.  Rubber bands hold the stack together. The stack is then placed inside a special plastic bag. 

When an item is placed in the vacuum sealer, all the air is sucked out of the bag and it is sealed closed. During this process the moisture from the pages is drawn into the dry blotter between the pages. The pages, which were relaxed by the moisture, are drawn flat by the pressure. We generally leave a book in the sealed bag overnight. Ideally, we open it the next day and the book is perfectly flat.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Many of the files from the African American Museum contain various forms of correspondence. There are many postcards and letters with their original stamps. When these already fragile envelopes were faced with the flood, the stamps detached to end in a pile at the bottom of the file folder.

The second project I gave Kallie was to reunite the stamps with their respective letters and postcards. This was a fun project because it’s like putting together a puzzle and some of the stamps are pretty interesting. I had her reattach the stamps using wheat starch paste applied with a small brush. When the stamp was in position, a small square of blotter was placed over it and weighted to absorb any excess moisture and prevent warping.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

We have encountered every problem in the book (no pun intended) while treating these ledgers for the Johnson County Historical Society. These two pictures of the same ledger are good examples. The structure of the book was sound. It needed a little bit of cosmetic repair and hinge repair. The inside is a different story. Almost all the pages are illegible, the ink has run and bled obscuring most of the text in the ledger.

In the front of the ledger was taped a small pamphlet. It was in relatively good shape. When it
got wet in the flood some of the dye from the orange paper transferred to the pages around it. I dry cleaned it, removed the staples and took off the tape with a heat spatula and vinyl eraser.

The tape left in the ledger I did not remove because it would have made a mess of the paper trying to scrape and melt it off. While it is not ideal to have tape in the book, as it gets older the tape will become brittle and flake away doing far less damage.