Preservation Week 2017

Next week here at the ISU Library we will be celebrating Preservation Week! It’s a wonderful time that we can devote to reaching out to the community and educating them on what we (and they) can do to preserve our personal and shared collections.

This year we will be hosting another Preservation Clinic: Ask the Experts that is open to the public. We invite those that are local to bring in a family heirloom or collectable and we will provide you with information on how you can properly care for and handle your item. We will be joined by some guest experts from the State Historical Society of Iowa as well as the Textiles & Clothing Museum. We will also have a representative from Digital Initiatives available to discuss our digital collections and the new Bomb transcription project that you may remember from our previous post.

If you are in central Iowa next week we invite you to come and join us and if you aren’t local I encourage you to check out the Preservation Week website for a lot of quality information on protecting our treasures!

 

“Transcribe the Bomb” has launched!

In 2016 the Iowa State University Library completed a six-year project to digitize an entire run of the campus yearbook, The Bomb. Comprised of nearly 45,000 pages, the digital versions are not easily searchable due to the wide variety of fonts and graphic elements used throughout the decades. Just look at the text from one page of the 1911 Bomb. The font and layout are unique, making the automated transcription process nearly impossible.

(“Bomb 1911”, page 9)

With that in mind, in its inaugural “Unsolved Histories” Project the Iowa State Digital Initiatives Unit has launched a crowd sourcing transcription project entitled, “Transcribed the Bomb.” It is our hope that by transcribing these yearbooks a wider audience can explore and find memories of themselves, their families and friends, favorite campus moments, and world events through the Iowa State University lens. Here is how YOU can get started:

1. Navigate to the following website: (http://yearbook.lib.iastate.edu/) You will arrive to a page that looks like this:
2. There are two ways to start contributing. You can either click “Sign-in” to create a profile or you contribute anonymous by just clicking “start.”
3. If you chose to make a profile you will need to navigate back to this page and click “start.”
4. A year of the “Bomb” will appear, after clicking “contribute now” and you will be able to begin the transcription process!!!

5. Once you start contributing you will be asked two questions before you are able to transcribe a page. The questions include: a) Is the page black? (If the page is blank, it will be skipped and you will be taken to the next page.) b) Does this page have text? (This meaning text, images with text, tables, page numbers, etc.)

6. Then you can begin transcribing!! Here are a few tips for transcribing:

• Transcribe exactly what you see
• Use [Image(s)] to indicate if there is image or images
• Hand-drawn or illustrations should be treated as text rather than images
• Transcribe captions or image titles
• Do not transcribe text found on clothing, pennants, sings, or other sources within the image.

(Here is a view of the transcription Page)

7.Once completed you can review the text and then submit the page

8.Repeat the steps to transcribe more ISU moments!

If you need more help you can find an interactive tutorial, examples and printable instructions on the ISU Library Guide Page: http://instr.iastate.libguides.com/transcribe or feel free to contact us at any time at: digital@iastate.edu.

Good luck and happy transcribing!!

 

Making Connections – by Julianna Biedenfeld

Sitting down in front of a computer and scanning pages one by one for hours at a time might not sound appealing, but I find it so interesting to be able to work on a project that allows these special materials to be viewed safely by many people. Recently, I have been working on a scanning project of materials from Hortense Butler Heywood. Heywood was an Iowa native who studied entomology and supported the women’s suffrage movement. A lot of the items I have seen from Heywood’s collection are personal letters, and quite a few of these letters that have small sketches on them. It’s a pretty cool aspect, because even though I will never meet Heywood, I can still see her personality come to life on paper.

It’s also fascinating to make connections with the authors of these historical items. Earlier this semester, I worked on a Pammel Court project, which happened to be where my grandparents lived while my grandpa was going to school at Iowa State. With this project, I found out that Heywood was a teacher for a couple years in Peterson, Iowa, which is where my dad grew up. Finding these little connections makes my work feel so much more personal and makes what can be mind-numbing work more enjoyable.

 

Custom Made Display by Jim Wilcox

One of the items that was used for the current Special Collections and University Archives ISU Pammel Court exhibit (designed by the History 481x class) is this little book. For the exhibit they wanted to show both the cover and one of the interior pages displayed as one piece.

 

With a quick sketch I came up with this:

 

I then had to think about how to hold the book up so it didn’t slide off the display wedge.

 

And then I had to figure out the dimensions….hmmmm…..

I drew out the 45 degree template and put the spine of the book along the diagonal. I went up about ¾ of the way and dropped a line down to the base. That gave me the measurements for the angled front piece, the back and the base.

 

I extended the base measurement out to make the lip that holds the book.

 

Then transferred all those measurements to a scrap piece of scrap board. Base, front, back, base with extension, face for book stop wedge, the piece the book will rest against, and the inner base to tape down.

 

I took those measurements and laid them out on the mat board and scored the lines about ¾ of the way through on what will be the bottom side of the base and added a piece of double stick tape to hold the book stop and inner base to the larger base.

 

And removed the little bit that wasn’t needed.

 

Double stick tape was used to hold the lip and the bottom pieces of the book support together after the book stop had already been folded and taped down.

 

This is what the final piece looked like from the side…

and from the front with a copy of the selected page.

 

 

 

Custom Portfolios by Mindy Moeller

Recently I was given four pictures that were copies of original paintings that needed to be housed in custom built portfolios.  We have a wide variety of sizes of portfolios but none that would fit.  I don’t mind making custom portfolios as they are fairly quick to construct and look professionally made.

But this wasn’t the first time I had seen the portrait of Petrina Jackson, Head of the Special Collections and University Archives here at Iowa State University.  Last August while I was at the Iowa State Fair Petrina and Eric Schares, Science & Technology Librarian, had their portraits painted on site by artist Rose Frantzen of Maquoketa at the university’s state fair exhibit booth in the Varied Industries Building while people strolled by.  The completed paintings themselves become a part of the university’s booth exhibit.  I had stopped by the day Petrina was having her painting made and chatted with her for a moment while Rose painted away and does a nice job of capturing the individuals on canvas.  So five months later I see the completed painting.

And it’s a perfect custom fit!

 

Large Map Enclosure by Mindy Moeller

Those of you of a certain age might remember in your early years at school the long metal tube with the large roll down map that hung on the wall of your classroom.  

Recently the Stanford’s large school series Map of India 1914 by James L. Barton came into my hands to construct an enclosure for safekeeping.  This map arrived in the Preservation Department as a folded 10” x 9” piece from a 62” x 54” map and with careful conservation efforts by our conservator, Sophia (Sonya) Barron, the map is now viewable again.  It was next handed off to me to construct a box.

The challenge in making this box was its size and I wanted a lightweight product.  I used the corrugated blue board for its length and light weight, Ethafoam for cradles that were easy to carve with a knife to the size I needed, Velcro straps to hold the box together, and Velcro coins to hold the end caps on.  I am pleased with the end product.  Stay tuned as there will be more on the Map of India in a future post from Sonya and her conservation treatment.

 

A variation on a mat board display cradle

This past week a new exhibit opened in Parks Library’s Special Collections and University Archives reading room. It is called “For Married Students”: Building a Community in Pammel Court, 1946-1978. The exhibit tells the story of a housing development that was built on Iowa State University grounds to accommodate  student veterans of WWII  and their young families, as part of the GI bill.

    

The Preservation Department staff worked hard to fabricate mat board exhibit mounts for the items to be displayed. Jim Wilcox and I set out to make a simple slanted mat board book cradle. We were attracted to using mat board because it is easy to manipulate and recycle afterward.  It turned out the task was not actually that simple! The slanted cradle needed to be quite strong to withstand the weight of the heavy book.

We looked at an article that provided details for construction of a cloth covered slanted cradle. (Andersen, Jennifer, Cloth Covered Book Cradles, Abbey Newsletter, Volume 17, Number 7, December 1993, http://cool.conservation-us.org/byorg/abbey/an/an17/an17-7/an17-715.html).

This is an excellent design, which has been used by many institutions for years,  but we still hoped to find a solution that was a little less labor-intensive.

We started with the tried and true model of two wedges on a base, using museum-grade mat board and double-sided 3M 415 tape. Then Jim added another wedge to the bottom of the base to slant the cradle forward.

A small triangular ledge is built into the base, it keeps the book from sliding  off the cradle. The tricky part was to keep this ledge securely attached to the rest of the cradle. The answer was…..drum roll….wait for it –  yes, book cloth! Not so revolutionary after all, I know!

But in this version, the book cloth is almost entirely concealed in between the various parts of the cradle. Pale tan Cotlin book cloth was attached to the cradle itself and to the wedge base that elevates the cradle, then wrapped around the ledge. Cloth is only exposed on that narrow triangular support ledge on the front of the cradle.

I used PVA to adhere the book cloth to the mat board and let the cradle off-gas for 2 weeks prior to installing it into the exhibit case.

Aside from the fun and excitement with the cradle, I became acquainted with a wonderful piece of equipment – the rotary cutter. We had lots of exhibit labels to cut out and the rotary cutter was excellent for making 90 degree cuts without the combined effort of lining up the paper, holding down the ruler and minding the scalpel. A plastic bar holds down your paper and a sharp blade makes the perfectly straight cut for you. It’s like a mat cutter for paper! The roatry cutter comes in a large size too, so for lightweight materials it can be a good alternative to a board shear.

      

Learn more about our new exhibit by checking out the links below.

Publicity article:

http://www.inside.iastate.edu/article/2017/01/19/pammel

Article about curating the exhibit:

http://www.iowastatedaily.com/ames247/article_e6b0e76c-bc29-11e6-83b2-c72d80011232.html

Photos from the exhibit reception:

http://www.iowastatedaily.com/ames247/collection_884277bc-ddfe-11e6-9272-6f8ae44f9de6.html#1