Board Shears

Our Vaggelli 54" board shear

Our lab has two board shears: a green beast of a Vaggelli,  and a smaller Jacques.  Everyone in the lab has his or her own personal favorite of the two.  While the Jacques charms me with its vintage style, I prefer the superior functionality of the green beast for actual cutting.  The Vaggelli has a longer cutting blade (54″), a wider bed area (48″), an Imperial and metric built-in ruler, and an adjustable, lockable guard that is easy to use and also easy to remove entirely when warranted.  The Jacques has a 40″ blade, a 26″ wide bed, an Imperial-only ruler, and its guard is fussy at best.  But did I mention how charming it is?  Using it feels like going back in time.

Our Jacques & Sons 40" board shear

No one around here could remember the last time the Vaggelli had its blades sharpened, and no records on the matter predate the current staff.  So, since the Vaggelli hasn’t been cutting particularly square lately, we decided a sharpening and fresh adjustment was in order.  We were prepared to pack up the blades and ship them off to the East Coast (at considerable expense) when we discovered that the sharpening company the HF Group uses, Jorson & Carlson, has a branch in Des Moines, a mere 45 minutes away from Ames.

Jorson & Carlson in Des Moines offers pick-up/drop-off services on Wednesdays, with a one-week turnaround for blade sharpening.  They even sent us a technician to remove the blades, and he will also reinstall and adjust them after they have been sharpened.  We experienced one small glitch: one of the screws holding on the top blade was stripped, so it took some assistance from FPM before we were finally able to free the blade.  We packed the blades with foam in a specially-built crate for a safe journey to Des Moines.

Board shear blades packed into a travel crate

According to Jorson & Carlson, board shears need sharpening only about every 20 years with normal use, so it looks like we’ll be all set until 2032!

 

1091 Project: The Iowa Preservation Community

While we try to give you a regular glimpse into the workings of the ISU Library Preservation Lab through this blog, we are also part of a larger preservation community in Iowa.  This post, the second in our collaborative 1091 Project with Duke University Libraries Preservation Department,  puts our university lab into a statewide context.  Be sure to visit Preservation Underground for a similarly informative look at the broader North Carolina preservation community.

We hope some day to have conservation colleagues over at the Textiles and Clothing Conservation Lab in Morrill Hall, just a few yards away from Parks Library.  In the meantime, Research Associate Suzanne LeSar uses the lab as a staging area for her work with the textiles and clothing collection.  You can read about our tour last summer of the Textiles and Clothing Conservation Lab here.

We’re lucky to have a group of wonderful colleagues a few hours’ drive away in Iowa City, at the University of Iowa Preservation Department and at the Center for the Book.  Under the guidance of bookbinder and conservator Gary Frost and papermaker Tim Barrett (recipient of a 2009 MacArthur Genius Grant) , the Center for the Book provides a locus for Midwestern book artists, printmakers, and papermakers.

Our department frequently consults and collaborates with our Preservation Department counterparts at the University of Iowa, led by Head of Preservation Nancy Kraft.  Last year, we worked with the U of I Preservation Department and the University of Northern Iowa Library (which has no preservation department of its own) to revise the RFP for the commercial binding contract shared by all three regent universities.  Working via email, conference calls, and in-person meetings, we worked together to revise the RFP, choose a binder, and iron out the details of the contract which will serve us all for the next 3 to 7 years.

Just an hour away in Des Moines, colleagues at the State Historical Society, Museum, and Conservation lab are also active in the Iowa preservation community.  State Historic Preservation Officer Jerome Thompson and Objects Conservator Pete Sixbey are both important contacts for us.  Paper conservator Sarah Raithel recently returned to Iowa after graduating from the Buffalo State College Art Conservation program in 2011.  She is currently contracted to treat some Civil War era materials for the State Historical Society, and is also in the process of setting up a private practice.

The Iowa Conservation and Preservation Consortium (ICPC), administered by Lucy David, holds an  annual meeting and also offers workshops throughout the year.  Our staff attend the annual meeting each year, and have also sometimes contributed to the programming.

For the past few years, our Head of Preservation, Hilary Seo, and I have been actively involved with the planning and execution of programming funded by an IMLS Connecting to Collections (CTC) grant written by Nancy Kraft and Jerome Thompson.  Hilary and I serve on the CTC committee along with Lucy David of ICPC and a handful of other consultants which include librarians, curators, and administrators from institutions around Iowa.  After the massive flooding in eastern Iowa in 2008, the focus of this project shifted to state-wide disaster preparedness.  We have given presentations around the state to raise awareness and emphasize the importance of having a disaster plan.  We’re also gearing up for a two-day workshop in April offering training in disaster planning, working with FEMA, using D-Plan, performing salvage triage, and hands-on salvage techniques.

While the density of preservation and conservation programs is much higher in my native Northeast, I  consider myself very lucky to be part of this small but committed preservation community in Iowa.  If you haven’t yet, be sure to visit Preservation Underground’s latest 1091 Project post to learn about the North Carolina preservation community.

 

Going a Little Batty

A Friday afternoon wouldn’t be normal without something out of the norm happening right before closing time.  A couple of weeks ago, I got a frantic call from Special Collections informing me that they had an unusual critter stuck in one of their sticky traps.  As the resident “bug lady,” I grabbed a plastic bag, and our volunteer Martha grabbed some latex gloves.  Then we made our way over to see what lovely creature was paying our co-workers a visit.

A bat! Not the typical small spider or lady beetle that I occasionally find in my sticky traps.

According to the Iowa State Extension website, Iowa bats are the size of a mouse or smaller and weigh about half an ounce.  Iowa bats feast on insects – they can eat up to 2000 mosquitoes on a warm summer night!  I can only guess that this fellow managed to get in and needed some chow to settle a rumbling tummy.

We are unsure how he made his way into Special Collections, but I have come to find out that he is not the first bat to find its way into the Library.  There have also been reports of the occasional bat in our loading dock area.  We all know that pests in libraries are not a good thing, but I will confess that he was kind of cute and a nice change from the usual bugs, although I hope his buddies keep their distance!

 

Bound Manuscripts: the Speeches of Adonijah Welch

Adonijah Welch was the first president of Iowa State University (back when the school was still the Iowa State Agricultural College) from 1869-1883.  We are conserving a few dozen of his handwritten speeches in order to prepare them for digitization.  Once they are digitized, they will be available through our Iowa State University Library Digital Collections website.  The originals will continue to be housed in University Archives, on the fourth floor of Parks Library.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Adonijah Welch’s beautiful and dramatic handwriting makes working with these documents particularly enjoyable.  I also really enjoy the various, innovative methods of binding.  We don’t know whether he bound these speeches himself, or whether an assistant did the binding for him.  My favorite (above) is a speech bound in three sections with pink ribbon.  A satin ribbon runs through the center of each section, and then all three ribbons have been gathered and knotted together on the outside of the spine.

Click on the image to enlarge.

The simple binding above uses cord in the same way metal rings would be used in a binder.  The cord has been looped through holes at the top and bottom margins of the manuscript and then knotted.

Click on the image to enlarge.

The above speech is also bound in several sections, with each section attached to the other with a rather untidy assemblage of stitching and knots reminiscent of a modern conservation pamphlet stitch.

While it is necessary for us to remove these “bindings” in order to digitize the manuscripts, we have thoroughly photodocumented them first.  Printed images of the original binding will be included in each manuscript folder.

 

Charging Ahead While Leaving Traces Behind

Before barcodes became the favored means of charging out library books and tracking their return, libraries experimented with many different systems for keeping track of their inventory.  RFID tags may be the next big thing on the horizon, although many libraries are still finding them prohibitively expensive (ours included).

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/3MLibrarySystems/Home/Products/RFIDTags/

Many of the books in our General Collections, particularly those housed in the off-site Library Storage Building, retain relics of library charging systems past.

If you work in a library, do you come across these items of now-ephemera in your own collections?  What do you do with them — leave them in the book?  Discard them?  Remove them and archive them, or file them away to recycle as an art project?