Community, outreach, education, and events Category

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Flood-Damaged Phonograph Records Sent Home

By
Nancy E. Kraft
– December 18, 2009Posted in: Community, outreach, education, and events, Flood Recovery, National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library

Friday, December 18, 2009

A much awaited event finally arrived. We returned close to 1,500 sound recordings to David Muhlena, Library Director for the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids. Cleaning the records was very labor intensive. We began our work in July 2008, working in the Paper Lab cleaning off the worst of the mud, mold, bacteria, and river debris. In September 2008, we brought the records to the conservation lab for a more thorough cleaning. We’re estimating that actual hands-on cleaning time was around 750 hours. We’re not done yet. We only returned the LPs and 45s, we still have the 78s to clean.

We could not have competed this project without the donation of archival tan board for the three flap enclosures by Archival Products, Des Moines, Iowa and funding for new sink/water system from the State Historical Society of Iowa Historical Resources Development Program (HRDP).

The local media has been very supportive in covering our flood “mile markers.” It’s always good to get the message out that many flood/water damaged items can be salvaged and to remind the public that recovery from a disaster such as the Iowa Flood of 2008 takes time.

http://gazetteonline.com/local-news/flood-recovery/2009/12/18/return-from-ruin-flood-damaged-records-restored-for-c-r-museum
http://www.kcrg.com/floodwatch/79688237.html?video=pop&t=a

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Endless Possibilities Grand Opening

By
Nancy E. Kraft
– December 16, 2009Posted in: African American Museum of Iowa, Community, outreach, education, and events, Flood Recovery

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Blog IMG_0510Last night I attended a reception for the grand opening of the African American Museum of Iowa’s permanent exhibit “Endless Possibilities” which traces the journey of Iowa’s African Americans. This event was also a farewell to curator Susan Kuecker who is moving to Pittsburgh.

Susan and I have crossed paths many times, sitting on the same board, giving presentations, sharing Blog IMG_0501preservation concerns. Since the flood I’ve gotten to know Susan even better and am impressed with all the work she’s done post flood. This exhibit is a fine example of her ability to bring a story to the public.

It was a lot of fun to go through the exhibit and see all the items that we had worked on put into context. There was no signage indicating what had and had not been in the flood. I doubt very much that anyone Blog IMG_0502going through the exhibit could discern which was which.

If you have been reading the blog, you should recognize the gourd, basket, money (the long thin metal),
suitcase, and buttons as items that we have cleaned.

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Presenting to the Iowa Special Libraries Association

By
Caitlin A. Moore
– November 9, 2009Posted in: Community, outreach, education, and events

Monday, November 9, 2009

On Nov. 6 Beth and I gave a presentation to the Iowa Special Libraries Association in Lindquist Hall. It was one of our first experiences presenting the flood project. It was a good feeling to see how interested people are in what we have been doing. The talk was scheduled to be an hour which seemed like an incredibly long time to have to fill when we started but I didn’t realize until we were putting our presentation together how much we’ve actually gotten accomplished. It’s hard to take a step back and see the big picture sometimes so explaining it to others gave us a new perspective and it was very encouraging.

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OLLI Students Create Post-Bound Photo Albums

By
Nancy E. Kraft
– November 2, 2009Posted in: Book & paper conservation, Community, outreach, education, and events

Monday, November 2, 2009

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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.

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Mock Disaster Recovery Drill at the Iowa State Fair

By
Nancy E. Kraft
– August 23, 2009Posted in: Community, outreach, education, and events

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.

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Volunteer Dawn Completes Docket Project

By
Caitlin A. Moore
– June 23, 2009Posted in: Book & paper conservation, Community, outreach, education, and events, Flood Recovery, Johnson County Historical Society

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

One of our volunteers, Dawn Wellington, has been working on a project re-ordering and re-housing a collection of court dockets for the Johnson County Historical Society. She went through hundreds of dockets and put them back in order and into new document boxes. When she finished, we had Leigh Ann Randak, the curator of the historical society come down to meet Dawn and check out our progress on that as well as other projects in the works. Our volunteers have been invaluable for projects like this one. It’s so satisfying to have one more thing to check off the list!

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Commemorating Flood of 2008

By
Nancy E. Kraft
– June 15, 2009Posted in: Community, outreach, education, and events, Flood Recovery

Monday, June 15, 2009

Blog DSCN0754 We were invited to participate in the university’s special event, “Remember, Reimagine, Rebuild,” at the Old Capitol Museum commemorating the one-year anniversary of last year’s historic flood. The Old Capitol was open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. for the free event, which included displays of flood-related photographs and research, audio excerpts from the StoryCorps oral history project, remarks and a musical performance.The event was attended and included food (always a plus).

Anytime we can give preservation of cultural objects, The State Historical Society of Iowa Historic Resource Development Program, and our department a little visibility, I’m all for it.

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Amanda’s Grandma’s Bible: A Tribute

By
Nancy E. Kraft
– May 25, 2009Posted in: Book & paper conservation, Community, outreach, education, and events, Mold, insects, and other agents of deterioration

Monday, May 25, 2009

Every once in a while, we get to make a difference in someone’s life. I think it’s fitting on Memorial Day and the anniversary of the Parkersburg EF5 tornado, to post these pictures of Amanda’s Grandpa opening the Bible that our conservator repaired as best he could. His wife, Amanda’s Grandma died in the tornado. If you look carefully, you can see the damage to the Bible. It now tells the tale of the tornado. We’re glad that we could contribute in our way by returning a little something of Amanda’s Grandma to her family.

Photos provided by Amanda.

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Majestic troublemakers

By
Caitlin A. Moore
– April 23, 2009Posted in: Book & paper conservation, Community, outreach, education, and events, Mold, insects, and other agents of deterioration, Storage environments

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Three volcanoes overlook the city of Arequipa. Arequipa is known as ¨La Ciudad Blanca¨ or The White City, because of Sillar, the white volcanic rock that many of the buildings are constructed of. Another less desirable byproduct of the volcanoes is a fine glassy dust carried by the wind to settle in a fine layer over everything, including books. The dust is so fine it permeates even the smallest of openings. Many of the books are centuries old and have accumulated centuries of dust. One of the ongoing projects here in Arequipa is to clean and remove the books from the San Francisco Monastery. The Books are housed in a condemned building. Pictures of the library are unavailable at the moment but will be added later. You´ll just have to settle for the volcanoes which really are majestic troublemakers. Picchu Picchu is trying to hide beneath the cloud bank, but it´s there.

Misti

Chachani

Picchu Picchu

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Book Studies and Political Science Collide!

By
Caitlin A. Moore
– April 21, 2009Posted in: Book & paper conservation, Community, outreach, education, and events, Materials, equipment and procedures

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Alvaro Meneses, Bibliographer, and Professor of Political Science at the University of San Pablo, paid a visit to our ¨conservation lab¨with his class today. Gary and Joyce talked about different book structures.

Chris Ryan gave a brief talk on early books printed at the Oldest University in Spain which is in Salamanca.

 

I demonstrated the construction of the ¨z¨ flags we use for cataloging and the reconstruction of a torn page. Gary showed a very large bible he has been working on by flattening pages and mending tears.

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