Conservation Tidbits

 

Endbands

Objects are invariably changed by the hands of those charged with their care. Traditions have been built on the question of how to properly repair  damaged artifacts. Some cultures have developed historic traditions like the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Bookbinders have even experimented with this idea in their personal work (See an interview about Kathy Abbott’s work) and as a collective of bookbinders in an exhibit called Tomorrow’s Past, which explores ways of rethinking conservation from the bookbinder’s perspective.

Repair on Q Horatii Flacci by Kathy Abbott. Photo from an interview on the blog Herringbone Bindery. http://www.herringbonebindery.com/blog/2015/12/13/bookbinder-of-the-month-kathy-abbott-2/

Tea bowl, Korea, Joseon dynasty, 16th century AD, featuring Kintsugi. Author: Picasa. Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As conservators, however, we follow a set of professional ethical guidelines when determining the best course of action. Conservation is not a renewal—it is not restoration. Conservation seeks to make stable, make accessible, an object for use. In book and archives conservation, aesthetic is not always a point of accessibility in the way that art on paper tends to be. Books are primarily tools to impart information. However, the history of the book has many examples celebrating the importance of aesthetics, not to mention the sensibilities of the eye.

Oversized set of volumes Theatrum machinarum hydrotechnicarum (TJ144 L573th). Left side: after conservation. Right side: before conservation. Note damaged endband with losses. Only a scrap of parchment remained of the head endband.

 

So when I was deciding on how to repair two large, thick set of volumes that were from a 3-part set, I had some choices to make. Both sets of volumes were missing an endband each. They had both been bound in the same way, with the same style of stuck-on endband composed of pale creamy tan and creamy white linen thread sewn over a linen cord and through a strip of parchment. Both had tooling on the spine. Even the paper appeared to be largely from the same papermill based on the watermarks. I could remedy the loss of the original endband by constructing a conservation endband—choosing a simple pale paper over a linen core—or I could resew a stuck-on endband to mimic the current endband.

Conservation endband by ISU’s Conservator Sonya Barron.

In no way would I try to reclaim the former glory—like a localized Benjamin button phenomenon–of sewing a new-looking endband on this book. That would not be congruous with the current state of the binding. (And again, conservation is not restoration.) In conservation I aim for an inconspicuous, functional repair. I want to preserve a book’s current faded state and the methods with which it was made in order to retain the truth of the object while restoring (ha!) it’s function.

Top: First set of volumes. Original on Left and New endband on right. Bottom: Second set of volumes. New endband on Left and original on right. The second band is a little less satisfactory, but functional.

In-painting Paper repairs

There is a certain comfort and security to toning repair paper before using it in any given situation. You have complete control over the pigment’s location until it dries. If, despite having made several practice swatches, the toning job doesn’t come out exactly as desired, you can start again. Not so with in-painting.

Left side: my set-up for in-painting. The object is placed on boards to both for my ease while working as well as to keep it off the table in case of any leaks or spills. Right side: pre-toned repair paper. There is some ability to achieve a mottled effect, however one cannot situate any variation in color as precisely as in-painting will.

After my first experience with in-painting, I have come to appreciate its merits. You can mimic the variations of color found in deteriorating leather bindings more easily than if you had tried pre-toning the repair paper . I make several color mixtures matching the main hues of the leather near the repair. Another position note: the pigment will only sit on the repair paper, instead of sandwiched in between the paper and the leather on the covering boards.

Myself in-painting the endcap using a brush sized 5/0.

In the course of my experience, I have discovered several things:

• Wheat starch paste on top of tissue makes for a great size, and thus will inhibit the absorption of paint and cause weird tidelines, or streaks, in the acrylic pigment. See the image below. Try not to get any errant paste where you want your acrylic to go!
  

  Streaks seen in a layer of acrylic wash over Okawara tissue that had been coated with a layer of wheat starch paste.

• Speckle several shades. See the image below of an outer join repair using Okawara Japanese repair paper on a leather binding.
  

  In-painting on Japanese Okawara repair paper using acrylics to achieve a mottled effect. Click the picture to view a larger version.

  

  In-painting on Japanese Okawara repair paper using acrylics to achieve a mottled effect.

• Dilute the paint with deionized water until it is slightly runny. It shouldn’t be thick like on the left side of the tissue in the example photo below of Okawara tissue. Additionally, too many layers of paint will create a plastic-like look.
  

  Experimenting with washes of acrylic pigment on thick Okawara Japanese repair paper.

• Use SC6000 to achieve the amount of sheen you’d like, if required to match the sheen of the leather. You can even burnish the repair further.
• Building up the joints with too many layers of tissue, paste, and acrylic pigment causes the paper to loose its flexibility, and increases the chance of the repairs cracking upon flexing.

 

Conservation Binding at a University of Iowa Visit

Image by Tom Jorgensen from his article, “UI Libraries’ new conservation lab merits a closer look.” https://now.uiowa.edu/2012/09/ui-libraries-new-conservation-lab-merits-closer-look

I had the chance to study some bookbinding structures at the University of Iowa Library’s Special Collections, attend their sixth annual William Anthony Conservation Lecture with Maria Fredericks, participate in a historic long-stitch class with maria Fredericks, and visit their conservation lab. It was a happily busy two days! By chance, I happened upon this awesome, simple and effective conservation binding while browsing bindings in special collections.

Diagram of the conservation binding.

As a viewer of this binding, I had no way of knowing its previous state. Did it ever have a cover? Was there any evidence at all of its previous structure? All I could know is its present state. The pamphlet was sewn to a set of endleaves with two bifolios each.

Aside from the subtle guarding of the pamphlet, no adhesive touched the little binding. It is unclear to me if the structure was sewed through existing holes. There was a cloth spine piece that lay loose against the textblock’s spine and was adhered between the pastedown and thin cover boards. The color of the covering material was an alum-tawed white.

 

From 1914 to 1989: conserving hundreds of signatures from Iowa’s history, By Cynthia and Sonya

They Hoyt Sherman Place Guest Book

Last year Sonya was contacted by a staff member from the Hoyt Sherman Place in Des Moines with a request to conserve the institution’s treasured Guestbook. One of the house’s most important objects in it’s collection is their Guestbook. In it you can find the signatures of many artists, musicians, writers and public figures who had attended events at the Hoyt Sherman Place. The Guest Book was started in 1914, and the latest signature Sonya could find was from 1989. The Hoyt Sherman Place, built in 1877, is now a recognized historic house and theater, and draws big crowds for its musical acts. It also houses an art gallery.
The sections of the guestbook lay loose in its damaged binding and its original green box was frayed and falling apart. Conservation was required for the volume to be safely exhibited at the Hoyt Sherman’s August VIP public event. The volume required paper repair, resewing the textblock, and reattaching the weighty, leather-covered boards.

 

The pages of the book before, during and after treatment.

Tears and losses in the textpaper were mended and filled with Japanese tissue. The sewing holes in the damaged spine folds were reinforced with Japanese tissue patch repairs so the binding could withstand resewing. The textblock was resewed on linen binder’s tape using a French link-stitch sewing technique.

 

Sonya attaching the binding to the textblock with hinges; the book after completion of work.

The spine was lined with transverse aerocotton and Japanese tissue panels, which served as the board attachment for the cover. Below, you can see the lifted pastedowns, under which the spine linings were inserted.

The binding during and after treatment.

As the volume could not fit in its original cloth case after conservation, a new box was made to house the guestbook and case separately. A cloth-covered, collapsible cradle was made by Cynthia so that the book could be displayed at a 90° angle, enabling safer handling. Once conservation was finished, we were able to arrange dropping the book off and getting our own private tour of the space.

The exterior and the reception area.

Executive Director Robert Warren with Sonya and Cynthia.

When we arrived, Executive Director Robert Warren was excited to see the final result of the conservation treatment, so we displayed the book with a brief description of the repair, and presented it on the custom cradle support. This setup would perfectly display such unique artistic signatures as the one above of “Mr Tweedy.”

The art gallery.

Our first stop on the tour was the gallery. Robert pointed out several notable paintings, including Apollo and Venus by Otto van Veen. This particular painting had been found stuffed in the back of a storeroom closet during renovations. It was badly damaged and discolored, and would undergo conservation before it could be displayed. Speculation as to why the painting was thrown in the storeroom seems to hinge on the central nude form featured in the painting and the conservative nature of early 1900s America. Read more about it here.

This massive secretary desk was meant to travel with the lawyer on his work trips. How unfortunate for his servants!

Robert showed us a lawyer’s desk, which was specially made with a mirror in the center. No, this was not for the jurisprudent to stare into his own reflection at will. Rather, it allowed him to see if anyone was approaching from behind with a look of vengeance and quite possibly a knife!

Original mural painting on the right and the modern recreation on the left.

During the renovation of the house, a conscientious team of historic preservation specialists found a square of the original mural painting when they were preparing the walls to be repainted. They decided to decorate the walls with the same design. True to principals at the heart of preservation, they left an original fragment behind, retaining a record of history and showing the changes the house had undergone.

Cynthia in one of the historic rooms on the second floor of the house

Since its foundation was first laid, the house has worn many hats. It first served as the family home to the Sherman family, built by Hoyt Sherman, a postmaster and politician. At one point, Sherman rented out his home for two years to The Sister’s of Mercy of Davenport, Iowa to host a 52-bed hospital. From 1907 onward, the Des Moines Women’s Club, whose growing membership prompted the construction of the theater in 1923, held their meetings at the house. They still operate out of the Hoyt Sherman Place to this day.

The interior of the historic theater including original Des Moines Women’s Club end panels on each row.

The theater hosts a variety of events, including rock concerts, ballet, and stand-up comedy. It is a must-see if you are ever in the Des Moines area.

 

Preservation Destination 2019: Cedar Falls and Waterloo

Here are some highlights of what we saw at Preservation Destination 2019!

On Monday our lab’s staff traveled to an event hosted by ICPC (Iowa Conservation and Preservation Consortium). It’s an annual get-together called Preservation Destination. A large group of us, Iowa preservation professionals, go to a place in Iowa and have behind the scenes tours of as many cultural heritage institutions as we can cram into one day. Here are some of our favorite things that we saw.

From Sonya Barron, Collections Conservator:

From left to right: 1. At the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) theater costume storage. 2. UNI Museum: a storage mount made for a saddle. 3. UNI Archives: The Rural School Collection ledgers

At the Ice House Museum we learned about how ice was preserved. Large blocks of ice were loaded into the barn-like building and stored there until the summer. Layers of saw dust had to be placed in between each ice block so that the blocks didn’t fuse together.

Every winter, the Ice House was filled up with ice to the top of the central beam. The light colored wood boards that you see on the roof show where there roof was repaired. Before the repairs these were holes!

From Cynthia Kapteyn, Assistant Conservator:

In 2008, The Cedar Falls Ice House Museum flooded. It was only inevitable, as the historic building is situated right next to the Cedar River. The disaster resulted in damage to nearly all of the artifacts in the collection, most of which were housed on the ground floor. To this day, the collections manager is still dealing with effects of the flood.

That’s where the water was in 2008.

In the picture above, conservator Sonya Barron is pointing to the spot the water rose to during the flood. To circumvent this issue in the case of a future catastrophe, the floor was raised a foot above the flood line.

From Mindy Moeller, Senior Conservation Assistant:

At the University of Northern Iowa Nathan Arndt, Assistant Director and Chief Curator of the UNI Museum at the Rod Library, gave us a very informative tour.  While at the UNI Museum, I was interested in seeing how they displayed and housed their precious and educational exhibits.  One picture that I took really stuck out in my mind as to how simple it was, easy to do, not costly, and we must use this example for the next time we are housing pins, buttons, or other small objects that can be stored together yet separated and protected. 

Small artifacts between dividers.

At the museum, they used small archival boxes and simply made “ice cube tray-like” dividers with pieces of 1/8” thick Ethafoam.  This idea could be used for any depth of an archival box to keep items apart and still have room for an identifying tag for each object. 

From Jim Wilcox, Conservation Assistant:

The raw material on the left and the mounts on the right.

The UNI Museum’s collections care and mount making room is a space with a large table, where you can work all the way around it and have all the supplies needed at hand. Like the large supply of backer rod you might find at a construction site. Why backer rod? To stabilize objects that are round at the base or nearly so and that could tip over easily. The items then could either be boxed, or stored on open shelving like this.

 

The Rip Off: Preserving Optical Discs by Lennox Fellow Amanda Gedeon

Progress continues on the optical media project here in the Preservation Department. All discs in the University Lecture Series collection have been ripped and are now in the process of being permanently stored. If permissions allow, certain lectures will also be uploaded to the Special Collections’ YouTube channel.
Technically speaking, most of the time so far has been spent navigating the Ripstation, a combination hardware/software system designed to rip large number of optical discs. The collection includes more than 1000 discs, primarily formatted as CD-DA, DVD Video, or data discs. Each of these formats requires a slightly different approach to preservation, typically in the form of what software is used.

The Ripstation at ISU Special Collections.

The majority of the discs recorded before 2010 were formatted as Compact Disc-Digital Audio (CD-DA). Because this is also the format most commercial CDs use, Ripstation’s proprietary software (also called Ripstation) was best-suited, as it is optimized for this sort of collection. Discs were ripped into two different formats for both preservation and access purposes. For preservation, the BWF 96khz/24bit format was selected for its lossless, uncompressed quality and its ability to embed desired metadata within the wrapper’s header, thus greatly reducing the chance of intellectual separation between content and metadata. For access, the .MP3 format was selected, because it is widely accepted and supported as an accessible audio format. In addition, of the available output formats, .MP3 can be most easily transcoded into an .MP4 file to upload to Special Collections’ YouTube access channel, with little risk for losing any data.

This transcoding for the access copies is handled by Adobe Media Encoder, as is uploading directly into the Lecture Series playlist. To match the access copies from the magnetic media, part of the Lecture Series collection that has already been uploaded, the desired output is an .MP4 with audio wrapped inside with a logo (YouTube only accepts video files). After upload, we apply closed captions to all files for accessibility.

An overview of the settings used in Media Encoder.

For the DVD-Video carriers in the collection, the desired output (perhaps somewhat obviously) differs from the CD-DA carriers. After some experimentation with variants on a data validation workflow, our conclusion was that the optimal output for Special Collections’ purposes was an .ISO disc image, which can be mounted easily as an access copy for researchers.

As the project progressed, some discs we encountered were neither CD-DA nor DVD, but simply data discs onto which .MP3 or other media files had been “dragged and dropped.” These were ripped with the DataGrabber software, and their original file format was maintained.

A selection of the optical discs held in the Lecture Series Collection.

What metadata Ripstation uses and where it draws them from varies by the software used, which itself varies by the format of optical disc being ripped. Ripstation’s primary software is the program of the same name, which is intended for CD-DA-formatted discs, typically commercial ones. For automatic metadata population, an internet connection is required, so Ripstation can scour private and open-source databases for the artist, album, track titles, and other relevant metadata per disc. Acquiring metadata this way would not be helpful to the project because of the singular and noncommercial nature of the content. Due to this constraint, as well as networking limitations, this particular Ripstation was left offline.

So from where could the software draw its metadata? Ripstation has accounted for this possibility in the design of the User Data feature. Typically, the names of ripped files could be an assigned structure of metadata that would look something like %D_%A_%Y . Each letter corresponds to an established metadata category, so files named according to this structure will look like “[AlbumName]_[AlbumArtistName]_[AlbumDate]”. This system also allows for user-input metadata, in the form of a .TXT file in the program folder. The User Data system, which allows up to 10 user-defined metadata categories (%0 – %9) and can be used with all Ripstation software, is what we used for this project.

Each disc file was named according to its AV number and container number, according to the information available in the masterlist. For later discs with no container number available, that value was substituted with the date of recording. Batches were named with the reference number of the collection, the container number of the first disc, the container number of the last disc, and (if CD-DA or DVD) the disc type.

Now that all 1000 discs have been ripped, the next phase is twofold: 1. Documenting the project (of which this blog post is a part) and 2. For the lectures without permissions restrictions, encoding and uploading to the Special Collection’s YouTube Channel. This process has already begun, with over 5000 minutes of audio made publicly available so far.

 

Seeing the sights: a trip to the State Library of Iowa and the Law Library at the State Capitol

Board Members of the Iowa Conservation and Preservation Consortium (ICPC) at the Law Library in Des Moines for an annual retreat.

This year I became an official Board Member of the Iowa Conservation and Preservation Consortium (ICPC). The ICPC hosts an annual meeting for preservation professionals in Iowa and the surrounding region SOS (Save Our Stuff), a Preservation Destination program, and training for the Iowa Museums Archives and Libraries Emergency Response Team (IMALERT). As a board member I get to go on an annual retreat with preservation friends, eat chocolates and donuts and discuss organizational business. Life could not get any more fun! Although I cannot shed light on the top secret information that only board members are privy to (just kidding, it’s actually pretty boring), I will share some of the awesome and curious things that we saw during our visit to Des Moines.

Top: State Library of Iowa building. Image courtesy of Flicker. Bottom: The Capitol building. Image Courtesy of RDG Planning and Design.

The board meeting is usually followed by a tour of whatever site hosted the retreat. This summer we were super lucky to meet at the State Library of Iowa. The library’s archivist, Tom Keyser, led us on an extended tour of the buildings and the underground tunnels beneath them. I took pictures of several things that intrigued me, which I will share in this post.

In the reading room of the State Library of Iowa.

Our first stop was in the reading room of the State Library of Iowa. Tom showed us the most fascinating medical “reference book” that I have ever seen – a replica human skeleton! All of the bones and the associated muscles are labeled in Latin. Before the days of medical school residencies in hospitals, young doctors did their training in the private practices of more experienced doctors, often in rural areas. The plastic skeleton was mailed out to young doctors as study material, then mailed back to the library when it was no longer needed.

Left: The key to interpreting the skeleton. Top right: The skeleton’s library accession number. Bottom right: There is a small hook fastening on the side of the skull to keep the top closed (I anticipate that the brain is inside).

Instead of walking out the building and crossing the street, we went to the basement and walked through a series of underground tunnels to get to the State Capitol. Apparently, many people who work in the two buildings walk the tunnels in the winter for exercise.

The tunnels right next to the State Library were built in the 19th century, and as you move close to the Capitol, the tunnel construction becomes increasingly more contemporary.

We saw a seemingly endless corridor that branched off the main tunnel and an abundance of mysterious pipes of varying dimensions and types.

In the oldest part of the tunnels we saw (bottom left) brick panel ceilings,  (top left) large enclosed areas filled with dirt almost all the way up to the ceiling, and (right) the spookiest janitorial closet ever.

Once we finally made it out of the sub-basement and into the Capitol, color and decorative elements assaulted the eye from every angle. I noticed that the beautiful floors in the State Library were made of mosaic, while in the Capitol the floors are tile.

Floor mosaic in lobby of the State Library of Iowa.

Details of floor tiles in the State Capitol

Both buildings feature a dome, although the Capitol’s dome is much larger.

Left: The interior of the dome in the State Library of Iowa. Right: The interior of the dome in the State Capitol

Both the exterior and the interior of the State Capitol had been renovated. The work was divided into 9 phases, starting in 1983 and ending in 2001 with the total bill of $41 million dollars. The Law Library, which is located inside of the Capitol, had been renovated as well.

Left: Interior of the State Capitol. Right: The Law Library.

The reading room and stacks of the Law Library feature some interesting outdated elements. There is a dumbwaiter, which used to carry books all the way up and down the 5 floors of the State Capitol. There is also a lovely sink and mirror combination in one of the side rooms. It does not have a currently functional plumbing unit. Small iron posts sticking out of the tall columns remind the visitors that the library used to be illuminated by gas lighting. The poles, which are difficult to see in the photograph below, were used to mount the gas lanterns.

Left: Dumbwaiter. Center: Historic sink and mirror. Right: Mount for a gas lantern. Image courtesy of the Iowa Legislature website.

The most rare and valuable books in the collection are housed in the locked A.J. Smalls Room. Some of the highlights are an atlas of hand drawn maps of the Des Moines River and an early edition of William Blackstone’s Commentaries.

Left: Hand-drawn maps of the Des Moines River. Right: Fire-charred copies of Blackstone’s Commentaries

The Iowa State Capitol on fire in January of 1904. Image courtesy of the Iowa Legislature website.

The Commentaries suffered fire damage during the 1904 fire. There is anecdotal evidence that diligent librarians were throwing these books out of the window in order to save them.

The 100 County Court Houses of Iowa.

A quilt featuring images of the 100 county court houses of Iowa hangs high up from a balcony railing in the library. The court houses are organized on the quilt in alphabetical order of the county. On the floor underneath it there is a small stand with a printed chart that explains which building is from which county. Even though each square on the quilt bares the name of the county, it is really hard to see the text from down below. Iowa actually has 99 counties, not 100. But Lee County has two court houses – one in the south and one in the north of the county, bringing the total for the state to an even hundred.

Many Mrs. and the lone Mr. Governor of Iowa.

The display case in the Capitol that I found the most fascinating, features doll representations of spouses of Governors of Iowa. The porcelain-faced dolls all have the same facial features, with different hair styles, and include 40+ wives and 1 husband. The dolls wear replicas of garments that the actual people had worn to their spouses’ inaugurations, thus showcasing many decades of fashion. It appears that some of the gowns would benefit from ministrations of a textiles conservator.

Top: Preservation Alert!! Doll with visible signs of damage in the fabric on her dress. Bottom: Commemorative plaque on the side of the display case.

The State and Law libraries have a breadth of material ranging from fiction to notable Iowa-related legal documents, as well as digital resources. Be sure to visit them on your way through Des Moines.