All posts by Beth Doyle

Conservation, Training

Farewell Phebe!

lab staff and Phebe
(L to R) Beth Doyle, Henry Hebert, Phebe Pankey, Rachel Penniman, Sara Neel. Not pictured: Mary Yordy and Erin Hammeke

Today is the last day for Phebe Pankey, our HBCU Library Alliance/University of Delaware Winterthur intern.  The past two months have flown by. We have thrown a whole semester’s worth (maybe more) of information at Phebe in eight weeks. She has learned a lot of new skills and has applied those skills to projects in the lab.

Some of the skills she has learned include:

  • Minor book repairs in the circulating collections
  • Minor paper repairs in support of the Section A digitization project
  • Custom enclosures including 4-flap boxes, corrugated clasmshell boxes, and CoLibri covers
  • Humidification and flattening of rolled plans from the Sarah P. Duke Gardens drawings and designs collection
  • Condition survey of the Bobbye S. Ortiz Papers
  • Mold removal
  • Photographic and written conservation documentation
  • Selection for conservation for general and special collections
  • Disaster planning and recovery of bound books
  • Environmental monitoring
Coptic binding
Phebe’s Coptic Binding model.

Henry taught Phebe how to sew a Coptic binding. Isn’t her first book beautiful? Phebe completed 494 repairs and custom enclosures during her internship. She completed work for the general collections including Perkins Library, Music Library, and Lilly Library. She also completed 119  repairs for Rubenstein Library  in support of our digitization project to scan the collections in “Section A.”

A big shout out to Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian in the Sallie Bingham Center, for hosting a show and tell of artist books. These really made an impression on Phebe, who is an art major. It’s great to see someone get inspired by our collections and our people.

We also scheduled tours all over the library and across the greater Raleigh-Durham-Greensboro areas. Some of these were:

  • Rubenstein Library stacks tour
  • Duke Libraries Technical Services tour
  • Duke Libraries Library Service Center tour
  • UNC Chapel Hill special and circulating conservation labs
  • NC State Archives conservation lab
  • Etherington Conservation Services
  • HF Group (commercial bindery)
  • NC State University Preservation Department
HBCU Library Alliance interns Miranda Clinton (L) and Phebe Pankey (R)
HBCU Library Alliance interns Miranda Clinton (L) and Phebe Pankey (R)

As we wrapped up this week we were lucky to have lunch with Miranda Clinton who is a student at NC Central University. She interned at the Library of Congress. We asked her to lunch to hear about her experience. Sounds like she had an amazing time there.

If you want to look back at some of the other work Phebe did, here are the blog posts:

HBCU Library Alliance Internship Announcement

Welcome Phebe

Poster Assessment

Internship Update

Tooling Workshop

Everyone in the lab helped Phebe learn new skills. Thanks to Erin Hammeke, Rachel Penniman, Mary Yordy, and Sara Neel for being so giving of your time and expertise. Thanks to everyone at Duke Libraries for being supportive of Phebe and generous with your time. Thank you to all the organizations that gave us tours. It’s always educational to see other labs and how they compare to ours. Thanks to the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for awarding us a grant to help support this internship. And a big thank you to all the student interns who made the first year of this program successful. We can’t wait to see where you all go next.

 

Conservation

FY 2018 By The Numbers

It’s that time of year again when we report our annual statistics to our administration. We thought we would share these with you, too.

1,093 Book Repairs (down 38% from last year)
1,066 Pamphlets (down 38%)
1,392 Flat Paper (down 87%)
5,975 Protective Enclosures (down 15%)
66 Disaster recovery
8 Exhibit mounts (down 64%)
746 hours of time in support of exhibits (includes meetings, treatment, installation, etc.) (up 452%)
1,002 items repaired for digital projects (down 90%)

38% of total work was for Special Collections
62% of total work was for Circulating Collections

74% of work was Level 1 [less than 15 minutes to complete]
23% of work was Level 2 [15 minutes – 2 hours to complete]
3% of work was Level 3 [more than 2 hours to complete]

Looking at the three year trend you can see the impact of two things. First, we had a steep decline in paper repairs because last fiscal year we were working on a mass digitization preparation project (dark red line). Those numbers skewed our stats for FY2017. In February, Tedd Anderson resigned as our conservation technician, and Mary Yordy reduced her hours. You can see their impact on the stats. Tedd did the majority of custom enclosures (green line) for Rubenstein Library. And both Tedd and Mary repair general collections materials (light red line). We  had a huge exhibit project this fiscal year that included a lot of complicated and time consuming repairs. You see a marked decrease in the percentage overall of items repaired for Rubenstein Library, but there was a marked increase in length of time we spent on those repairs. So the percentage is down, but the number of Level 3 repairs are up.

Not Everything Is A Statistic

We hope you enjoy looking back at the year that was FY2018 as much as we did. We can’t wait to see what FY2019 brings.

Quick Pic

Quick Pic: What’s in Your Freezer?

packing the freezerWe are getting the first large collections that have been selected for freezing into our freezer. We are following the National Park Service’s guidelines for packaging photographic materials for freezing.

Lucy Vanderkamp worked with us to wrap these boxes of  negatives.  We got better and faster at wrapping as we went along. By about box ten we felt like experts.

If you are unfamiliar with the NPS “Conserve-O-Gram” series, there is an awesome amount of information there. Check them out.

Conservation

Welcome Our New Staff Member: Sara Neel

Sara Neel
Sara Neel, Senior Conservation Technician

Please help us welcome our newest staff member, Sara Neel. Sara recently graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in Art History and a minor in French (which has already come in very handy).  Sara worked in the KU Libraries Conservation Lab from 2015 until graduation this year. She has studied abroad in Italy and France;, and recently gave a paper at the Missouri Western State University & The Albrect-Kemper Museum of Art Second Annual Undergraduate Art History Symposium titled “The Assembly of the Tejaprabha Buddha: Removal, Restoration, and Religious Reduction.”

So far this week she has gotten her bench in order, helped edit some lab manual documents, learned to make corrugated “pizza-box” enclosures, and discovered that the Parking Office is really far away from our building. We are so happy she is here!

Quick Pic

Quick Pic: The Best Tour Ever

Today we hosted a delightful group of grad students from a class that Liz Milewicz, Head of Digital Scholarship Services, is working with. They declared Conservation to be “The Best Tour Ever.” We kind of agree. Here we are looking at Kenneth Arrow’s Nobel Prize medal. people looking at Nobel Prize medalWe recently had the preparators from the Nasher Museum here to fit the Nobel medal for a custom display mount. We know this medal will get a lot of use so we are having a special display mount made for it. The Nobel Prize is something almost everyone has heard about but rarely do you get a chance to see one up close. It’s a special object to have in the lab for show-and-tell.

Preservation Week

Preservation Week: A Nobel Experiment

It’s Preservation Week!  This week, we are looking at the daily life of a conservation department and the work we each do in  support of the library and its mission. On Monday, Mary was repairing a book with very cool end papers. On Tuesday, Beth was in a meeting (surprise!).

Sometimes you need to bring in expertise when faced with a particular challenge. Rachel is working with Brad Johnson and Patrick Krivacka from the Nasher Museum of Art to build a custom mount for Kenneth Arrow’s Nobel Prize medal. Today was the medal’s first fitting. They also discussed the finish for the stand and came to agreement on the height of the frame.

Fitting the medal in the stand
(L to R) Rachel Penniman, Brad Johnson, and Patrick Krivacka discuss the fit of the display stand.

 

Kenneth Arrow was an economist, professor, and Nobel laureate. Arrow’s career is especially distinguished by his contributions to the theory of social choice, including his book Social Choice and Individual Values, published in 1951, and his contributions to general equilibrium theory. For these achievements, Professor Arrow has been awarded the Johns Bates Clark Medal (1957) and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1972), which he shared with Professor Sir John Hicks.

We are very excited that we will have a custom-fit stand so that the Nobel medal can be displayed in classes, show and tells, and exhibits. Thanks Patrick and Brad!

Preservation Week

Preservation Week: Sometimes You Get Doughnuts

It’s Preservation Week!  This week, we are looking at the daily life of a conservation department and the work we each do in  support of the library and its mission. Yesterday we saw Mary in repairing a book with very cool end papers.

As a department head my job is to make sure  we have the budgetary and human resources that we need to do our work, advocate for my staff and department, and make sure our priorities fit into the strategic direction of the library. To that end, I attend a lot of meetings.

Technical Services department head meeting
Technical Services department head meeting.

Duke Libraries has a culture of collaboration,  so we do a lot of talking with each other.  My standing meetings include departmental and individual staff meetings; Technical Services Department Head meetings; meetings with my supervisor; the monthly all-library staff meeting; the Multi-spectral Imaging team meeting; quarterly division meetings; and meetings with other department heads outside of Technical Services  usually over lunch or coffee. Then there are special meetings that are called around projects or initiatives, budget setting, and other administrative duties. Then there are the meetings that happen on the fly at the bus stop, in the hallway, or in the cafe line.

By attending these meetings I am gathering the information I need for the department to be successful, I’m building relationships across the library, and  I am also finding out what is happening in other departments that might impact our workflow. I know for some people all these meetings sounds like torture, but I rather enjoy getting together with colleagues to think about our collaborative future. And sometimes you get doughnuts.

Conservation

See ‘Ya Later Tedd

 

Good luck Tedd!

It is a bittersweet day in Conservation. Tedd Anderson has decided to leave the lab and we just won’t be the same. Tedd has been with Conservation for six years. He was hired to help with what we called “The Enabling Project.” This was work we did to help prepare the Rubenstein Library for renovation. It required a lot of boxing. So much boxing.

Once that project was over, Tedd continued to make custom enclosures for Rubenstein. He also treated materials from the general collections, and he helped with preparing special collections materials for digitization. In his time here almost 20,000 items crossed his bench. Many of those things needed custom enclosures. Tedd could make a box for just about anything. Cigarette rolling machine? Sure. Suitcase? Yep. A typewriter? No problem. He even made a pretty awesome eclipse viewer to watch last year’s solar eclipse.

Tedd also contributed to this blog. He wrote about the very large boxes he made for our four-volume Audubon set. He also wrote about designing and making enclosures for the very small books in our miniature collection.

We will miss Tedd’s sense of humor, his dedication to all things boxing, and his artistic doodling during staff meetings. So long Tedd. We wish you well and look forward to hearing about your next big adventure.