Cheers and Good Luck Tanya!

A couple of months ago I blogged about my boss, David Gregory, retiring and now I get to reminisce about our former Head of Special Collections and University Archivist, Tanya Zanish-Belcher.  Just two weeks after David left, Tanya went off to be the Director of Special Collections and University Archivist at Wake Forest University.  Although, those of us still here at ISU really resented the fact that she was sending us images of daffodils blooming in Winston-Salem in March (especially since it was snowing in Ames at the time and is now snowing here in May!), we miss her.

Tanya started here in 1995 as the Curator of the Archives of Women in Science and Engineering, and in 1998 became the Head of Special Collections.  Laura, our archivist, blogged a farewell to Tanya in January highlighting what she has done for and meant to the Department over her 17 year tenure.  She was their leader and mentor, spokesperson across campus and the community, and a national presence in the profession.  She’s a Society of American Archivists Fellow.  It doesn’t get much better than that.  She’s a dynamo, participating actively at every level in the archives world, but she also looks beyond the Archives and Special Collections.

When I started here, the relationship between Special Collections and Preservation was a little chilly.  Communication was non-existent and, pre-Tanya, items for conservation were selected without Special Collection’s knowledge.  Tanya made it a point to repair the relationship and she not only became my colleague and co-worker but also my faculty mentor, collaborator, friend, and some would say co-conspirator.  She brought to my attention some of the problems that she had discovered and we talked about workflows, tensions over decision making, and the lack of communication.  We saw this as a shared challenge and worked at establishing workflows and opening lines of communication.  We both knew all too well the stories about obstinate curators and conservators that would only consider the singular best way to provide access to, value, handle, and treat an artifact; any compromise would go against their standards even if it meant it could no longer be stored on any shelf or used in anyway.

This is not to say that Tanya and I always saw things eye-to-eye, and on some issues probably still don’t.  We also brought our differing philosophies and perspectives to the table when discussing preservation and access.  Special Collections and Preservation have closely aligned but slightly different missions and goals.  Our responsibilities to the collection and the user, and our codes of ethics guide us in ways that do not always result in the same expectations and results.  We learned to compromise without straying from our codes of ethics or standards, but this took a lot of communicating and learning about the real issues behind the disagreements.  As I mentioned, we still may not agree on everything, but I learned so much from the conversations and arguments we had.  These discussions on when full-treatment was appropriate versus stabilization or simply re-housing were very informative.   We ended up collaborating on a couple of articles that evolved out of our discussions:  “Pitfalls, Progress, and Partnership:  Collaboration Between Special Colelctions and Preservation in Academic Libraries,” and “Square Pegs, Round Holes:  Thinking Creatively about Housing and Storage.”

Spa day!

I think it’s funny that colleagues ask me what I’m going to do without Tanya or how I’m holding up now that she is gone because I do miss my friend but they do not seem to realize that we sometimes battled it out.  For that I am grateful because I am a better preservation advocate now that I also have a better understanding of the curator/archivist perspective.  I’m certain that our philosophical debates will continue over email and we will continue to learn from each other, but I miss our mimosas!

 

A Glitch in the System: Accessing ISU Library Digital Collections

The Iowa State University Library Digital Collections include a wide variety of content which is presented in a variety of formats.  There are many photographs presented as individual images, some audio and video files, and plenty of PDFs like the example below of a seed catalog from 1887.

We want all of our collections to be accessible to the public who view the content from a variety of computer devices that connect to the internet, so we test everything by viewing it on different computers besides the computers on our desk in our office.  We discovered that our PDFs were not opening on any of the public computers throughout our library.

The library has an automated system that turns off all the public computers when the building closes and when it turns them on in the morning, it also opens the Internet Explorer browser to the library web page so that when a patron comes up to any computer it’s ready for searching the library.  Eventually, I figured out that the reason that the PDFs were not opening was that the add-ons for Adobe PDF and Adobe PDF Link Helper were not enabled when the Internet Explorer browser opens automatically each morning.  Through much trial and error, I finally figured out that all I had to do was to close Internet Explorer and re-open it for the Adobe PDF add-ons to be enabled.  However, having somebody manually close and re-open Internet Explorer every morning on all the public computers in the library is not a very good solution to the problem.  Library IT is looking into why the Adobe PDF add-ons are not enabled when Internet Explorer opens automatically every morning and how to make it happen.  However, as Library IT continues to work on a solution, this glitch in the system remains for our potential Library Digital Collections users.

 

Hand in Hand: Analog and Digital Preservation

Sometimes people are surprised to find out that I have an interest in digital preservation.  I find their surprise surprising.  It’s as if they assume that, because I am a book and paper conservator, I must labor away in an ivory tower filled with moldering books while the modern trappings of technology hold no sway over me, if, indeed, I realize that “digital technology” exists at all.

Image from Lisa Gregory’s ASERL-sponsored webinar “Preservation Planning and PREMIS,” held on April 2, 2013, 11 am EST.

While it is true that my profession entails a love affair with history (i.e. “the past”), and the literal tools of my trade are mechanical devices and hand tools designed centuries ago, my passion for preserving the cultural record crosses the boundary of analog versus digital.  As time ticks relentlessly on, the culture of the present day slips ever backwards into history, and preserving born-digital works becomes just as important as preserving centuries-old manuscripts.  In truth, I see little difference in the mission.  In my day-today activities, I may deal more with the chemical deterioration processes of cellulose than I do with corrupted bitstreams, but I still consider it a significant part of my profession to stay informed about advances in all aspects of library and archives preservation.

I’m lucky to have a supervisor who shares my sentiments.  Our Head of Preservation includes me on the “Digital Team,” which is made up of our Head of Preservation, the Digital Initiatives staff, the Digital Repository Coordinator, the University Archivist and Assistant Archivist, and — when the position is filled later this spring — our Cataloging and Metadata Management Librarian.  This also means that I am invited to educational webinars like the one we all attended today, the ASERL-sponsored webinar “Preservation Planning and PREMIS,” presented by Lisa Gregory, the Digital Collections Manager at the State Library of North Carolina.  The webinar is the first in a series of four about digital preservation.  I enjoy thinking over the theories and practicalities of digital preservation while I’m at the bench, repairing and mending books and documents centuries older than I am.

 

1091 Project: Portrait of the Student Technician

This month’s 1091 Project highlights the role of student workers in the Conservation Lab.  Quite honestly, many university conservation departments wouldn’t be nearly as productive without these unsung workhorses of conservation. Often the most tedious tasks fall to the students: they make enclosures, tip-in loose pages, surface clean, and vacuum moldy items.  Yet they perform these tasks efficiently and cheerfully, and miraculously, they keep showing up for work.

When I interned at the Conservation Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, many of the students working in the lab were also studying in the GSLIS program.  We don’t have a library school here at ISU, so our students come from other departments. Of our current four student employees, one is a graduate student pursuing her MA in History (although she started working for us as an undergraduate Anthropology major), one is an Anthropology major, one is a Design major, and one is a Elementary Education major.

Hannah makes spine title labels for tux boxes.

Our students tackle a variety of projects according to their handskills and experience.  Hannah just started with us this semester, and she has learned to surface clean, insert tip-ins, sew on pamphlet binders, and construct tux boxes and other four-flap wrappers.  We have a shelf full of items needing other types of boxes which will be next on her plate.

Devin has been with us for about a year, but already had excellent handskills from her experience in the College of Design.  She performs many mid-level treatments such as custom portfolio construction, double-fan adhesive bindings, and shield bindings.  Devin divides her work schedule between Conservation and the Preservation Services unit of the Preservation Department.

Ashley clamps down adhesive bindings in a book press.

Ashley and Hope have both worked in the lab for two and a half years.  Their handskills have developed beautifully during this time, and both are now capable of executing more advanced book repairs such as rebacks, new cases, re-cases, and “full repairs,” which they tackle when the more general student treatment workflow slows down at various points throughout the year.

Hope repairs a volume of color samples. And yes, she knows that our volunteer Martha is giving her mutant bunny ears. She’s good-natured like that.

When we hire new students, we look for hobbies or work experience that show evidence of good eye-hand coordination, but we don’t expect them to have any prior bookbinding or conservation experience. The typical student workflow includes materials preparation (such as cutting spine inserts and hinging endpapers), surface cleaning, box-making, tip-ins, page mending, pamphlet binding, double-fan adhesive binding, shield binding, vacuuming mold, and small-scale deacidification using a compressor and Book Keeper’s spray unit.  The students have also been called upon to assist during disaster recovery.  In fact, when Hope and Ashley first started working in the lab, they spent a month washing Mylar architectural plans which had been damaged during the 2010 Ames flood.

We know our students’ first and foremost goal is to receive a good education here at ISU.  We appreciate being just one of their many priorities, and have been impressed by their reliability, their cheerful hard work, and their diligence in developing their handskills.  We couldn’t run the lab without them!

Don’t forget to stop by Preservation Underground to hear about the student technician experience in the Conservation Lab of Duke University Libraries.

 

E-Journal Preservation Registry

The PARS Forum held in Seattle during the 2013 ALA Midwinter meeting focused on e-journal preservation and in particular the Keepers Registry which is a database of e-journals and the entities that are caring for their long-term access.  Ann Marie Willer from MIT hosted the session, appropriately so since last year, she presented on a project that identified e-journal stewards for MIT’s holdings before this database was available. Winston Atkins from Duke University and Robert Wolven from Columbia University presented some of their findings when they ran their journal holdings against the Keepers Registry.

The Keepers Registry is currently in Beta and was developed by EDINA, a national data center at the University of Edinburgh with the assistance of the ISSN International Center. Bibliographic information is provided by the ISSN Register. The Keepers Registry basically keeps track of  e-journals that are being archived by at least one of the following repositories:  British Library, CLOCKSS Archive, e-Depot, Global LOCKSS Network, HathiTrust, National Science Library (Chinese Academy of Sciences), and Portico.

 

Some of the current limitations of the database were touched on by the presenters. Because the Keepers Registry is based on the ISSN Register, only journals with well formed ISSNs are included in the database. Wolven reported that half of the Cornell & Columbia project titles did not have ISSNs and for those titles that did have ISSNs, roughly 25% were included in the registry. Atkins also experienced roughly a 22% hit rate with the 61,682 serial titles at Duke. It was also reported that among the titles archived by these agencies there was a lot of overlap or redundancy among the agencies especially for major titles. Some titles do not have complete runs within a single repository and some of these segments are scattered across multiple repositories. This creates a reliance on multiple archiving agencies to guarantee preservation of complete runs of e-journal titles. To address these gaps, the identification of other archiving agencies is underway.

Participating agencies are required to share their metadata with the Registry. This information is linked to the authoritative bibliographic information obtained from the ISSN Register. These agencies also provide Keepers with a description of their organization and their approach to the preservation of and access to their digital content. Keepers is still finalizing the requirements for agency participation.

Keepers is a step toward global collaboration in preserving e-journals. It also provides the tool to identify titles that are not being preserved by trusted agencies and most at risk.