1091 Project: Digitization and Conservation

This latest installment of the 1091 Project, a collaboration with Preservation Underground, the Duke University Libraries Conservation blog, addresses the relationship between digitization and conservation at our respective institutions.

Last year, I wrote a post about some of the philosophical issues surrounding the digitization and conservation of historical materials.  Today, I’ll address the practical issues of negotiating this relationship within our institution.

At Iowa State University Library, the Digital Initiatives unit is part of the Preservation Department, along with the Conservation unit, and the Preservation Services unit (Binding, Mass Deacidification, Reformatting, and Marking).  Having Digitial Initiatives and Conservation in one department under one supervisor makes it easy to foster a close working relationship.  When Digital Initiatives first started, it operated as its own independent unit in the Research & Access division of the Library.  Organizational restructuring in 2008 provided an opportunity to move the unit into the Preservation Department.

Locating Digital Initiatives in the Preservation Department has proved to be a strong stewardship decision for the Library.  I’m not suggesting this is the only organizational plan that promotes good stewardship, simply that this decision proved to be highly effective for our institution.  From a physical stewardship perspective, materials which travel to and from Special Collections & Archives for digitization never bypass preservation.  The materials are assessed (and sometimes treated) before digitization, and they are examined (and sometimes treated) after digitization.  From a digital stewardship perspective, Digital Initiative operates with a full understanding of digital preservation issues, and is able to stay current with best practices in this quickly-changing specialty.

The Digital workflow comes mainly from Special Collections & Archives.  Materials travel from Special Collections & Archives to the Conservation Lab, where they are quickly assessed for stability.  Stable materials are sent on to Digital Initiatives for digitization, and a streamer traveling with the materials indicates whether they will need to return to Conservation for post-digitization stabilization, treatment, and/or rehousing, or whether they can return directly to Special Collections.  Should any mishap occur during handling (an extremely rare occurrence), then Digital Initiatives staff know to send the materials back through Conservation post-digitization.

The Conservation workflow for materials to be digitized is often split between pre-digitization and post-digitization materials.  Treatments that are required for safe handling of the materials are prioritized in an effort to get them to Digital as expediently as possible.  Materials returning from digitization on their way back to Special Collections & Archives receive a secondary priority status, since researchers will have access to the digital surrogates as soon as the metadata is completed.  Conservation and Digital Initiatives communicate frequently and adjust their priorities in order to accommodate one another’s workflows.  Sharing a supervisor allows the two units to balance occasionally differing priorities with minimal difficulty.

Pre-digitization treatments include dry cleaning, humidification and flattening, and mending (when required for stabilization), and disbinding when necessary.  Post-digitization treatments include more complex mends, rebinding when necessary, and rehousings.  Of course, this is a generalization of our procedures, and more detailed treatment decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

Staff from Digital Initiatives, Special Collections & Archives, and Conservation hold regular monthly meetings to discuss the current workflow, plan for upcoming projects, and troubleshoot.  Starting next month, our new Digital Repository Coordinator will be joining these monthly meetings.  He will be building and managing our digital institutional repository (its own unit in the Library’s Research & Access division), so it will be interesting to see how our intra- and interdepartmental relationships continue to evolve!

Duke University Libraries structure their digitization and conservation efforts differently; let’s head over to Preservation Underground and see how they make it work.

 

Aloha Harrison!

All the way from Honolulu, Hawaii, and various points along the way, Harrison Inefuku has joined the ISU Library as our first Digital Repository Coordinator. Harrison will be in charge of our institutional repository through Digital Commons, where we hope to provide open access (no-cost, online access to scholarly research results that are free of most copyright and licensing restrictions) to our electronic theses and dissertations, publications from our faculty, gray materials produced by departments and centers on campus, and much, much more. He will also work very closely with Digital Collections, help establish digital preservation policies, and develop our electronic records management program.

Harrison has a dual BFA in Graphic Design and BA in Visual Culture from the University of the Pacific, and a dual Master’s degree from the University of British Columbia in Archival Studies, and Library and Information Studies.  It sounds like he needs a dual position here as well–we’ve got plenty of ideas and we certainly don’t want him getting bored!

After graduate school, Harrison was an ARL Fellow at the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health, where he developed a set of preservation workflows for electronic records acquired by NLM’s Archives and Modern Manuscripts Program. Just before joining us here, he worked on an InterPARES 3 Project “Digital Records Forensics Project and University Institutional Repositories: Copyright and Long-Term Preservation Project.”

Even though he is so early in his career, Harrison has already given a number of presentations and poster sessions on institutional repositories at national conferences. So look for him at ALA, SAA, and other conferences in the near future.

We are excited to get our institutional repository off the ground and to work with Harrison. We will have him share his experiences with you, here, on the blog.  So far, his adventures revolve around life in Ames, Iowa: he was relieved to find that Spam is cheap. We’ve got him roped in; he thinks everything is on sale, all of the time. Ah, the joys of living in the Midwest.

 

Satisfaction Guaranteed

The first thing I surface cleaned and washed as a conservation student was an engraving that had been lost in the basement of a local historical museum. When I put it in the sink, the water instantly turned brown. My conservation instructor looked across the sink at me and said “satisfaction guaranteed.” It was indeed satisfying to watch the dirt release in the water, and as a young conservator I felt like I had done something to improve the print.

The truth though is that we often spend time cleaning and washing objects that show little discernible evidence of our work. I used eraser crumbs to clean some garden design prints last summer, and the only evidence that I had made an impact was the fact that the eraser crumbs turned black. To the naked eye the prints themselves looked just the same.

As conservators our goal is to stabilize objects, not to make them spiffy clean and new-looking. Many of the things done in the early years of our profession, like aggressively bleaching paper back to white, shortened the life of objects or made them more fragile. Our knowledge and our ethics teach us that sometimes our work is finished even though there is no visible improvement.

Still, it is human nature to want to see a visible change from time to time. Fortunately, there are times when you do get that satisfaction. Now, I wouldn’t suggest that anyone really wants to spend as much time with flood damaged plans as I have in the last year and a half, but there are some rewards to the work. You can use a chemical sponge on one side of a plan that looks like this..

…and after about ten minutes have something that looks like this. (And yes, they are photos of two different plans, but I didn’t get the idea for the blog post until I was mostly done cleaning.)

Satisfaction guaranteed indeed.

 

On Our Bookshelves: The Story of Leather

The Story of Leather (1915) by Sara Ware Bassett. Early 20th century American publisher's binding in green bookcloth with embossed black title and front board decoration. Photomechanical print illustration on front board.

Sometimes it’s fun to take a break from modern conservation scholarship and dip into an historical novel, like Sara Ware Bassett’s The Story of Leather (1915).  This novel was one in a series of “educational novels” by Ms. Bassett, including The Story of Cotton, The Story of Lumber, and The Story of Iron, to name a few.  This rather charming tale follows the adventures of Peter Coddington, whose father owns a leather tannery in which Peter learns the trade.  The plot lightly touches on labor relations, fair wages, and workman’s comp, all wrapped up in a mystery that dates back to the Civil War and carries the message of honoring one’s moral debts.  Woven throughout this sweeping storyline are many detailed passages about the process of preparing skins, the process of chrome and vegetable tanning, and the methods of finishing leather.

Nat Jackson teaches the young, incognito Peter Coddington the basics on the floor of the tannery.  He describes the process of washing and softening the dry skins after they come to the “beamhouse,” and then shows Peter the pit of lime where the skins are soaked until their fibers swell and the hair loosens from them.

“But I don’t see that the skins that are tossed into the lime pits come out with the hair off, ” objected Peter.

“Bless your heart — the lime does not take the hair off.  The men who unhair them have to do that.  They lay the wet skins out on boards and with sharp knives pull and scrape off all the white hair.”

“Why don’t they take off the brown or black hair as well?”

“Because only the white hair is removed by hand.  That is kept separate and after being dried is sold to dealers for a good price.  The colored hair is taken off by machinery and is sold too, but it is not so valuable.”

“I suppose plasterers can use hair like that, ” speculated Peter.

“Yes, and upholsterers, ” added Jackson.

This 240-page novel is a quick, pleasant, old-fashioned read, with clear descriptions of the leather-making process near the turn of the 20thcentury.

Dyed goatskin leathers from Pergamena (Montgomery, NY).

To bring you back to the 21st century, here are some photographs of goatskin and calfskin leather taken with the ProScope 200x digital microscope.  As you can see, the goatskin pores are much larger and more unevenly distributed than the tighter, more evenly spaced pores of the calfskin.  This difference is noticeable even on the macroscopic level, and can be used to distinguish types of leather by sight and touch.

Un-dyed goatskin leather at 200x magnification (left); un-dyed calfskin leather at 200x magnification (right).

 

Your Perspective: Tacketing

Tacketing Cut-Away Model (click to enlarge).

From time to time, in order to avoid letting our thinking get too narrow and insular, we like to look past the walls of our own lab and solicit the opinions of conservation colleagues on equipment, materials, and treatment methodologies.  While there is an increasing body of conservation literature available, I find I miss the more casual debates that arise from working in a lab with multiple conservators, technicians, and interns.  Since we have just one of each, we really appreciate conversations with our virtual colleagues at other labs and in private practice.

On that note, I’m interested to hear your thoughts about tacketing as a treatment method for reattaching heavy, laced-on boards.  In general, I am a fan of using various modifications to the “Princeton Treatment 305” method for board reattachment published by Brian Baird and Mick Letourneaux in 1994, and there are other methods such as board slotting which offer repairs of comparable strength.

However, I’d like to hear your thoughts specifically on tacketing.  Is tacketing your favorite, go-to treatment? Do you consider the treatment — which is, admittedly, very strong — to be too invasive?  Do you consider it unnecessary in all instances, or appropriate only in certain circumstances?   If you do use tacketing, what is your approach?  Favorite tools and materials for executing the treatment? Please join the conversation in the Comments section below.

Tacketing Cut-Away Model, front and back three-quarters view (click to enlarge).

Tacketing Cut-Away Model. Close-up view of exposed and covered tackets on outer joints (click to enlarge).

Tacketing Cut-Away Model. Detail view of exposed and tissue-covered tackets on inner hinges (click to enlarge).