All posts by Beth Doyle

Announcements, Conservation, Preservation

Last Minute Gift Ideas

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With contributions from Winston Atkins, Preservation Librarian

Never fear, your secret holiday helper is here! We have for you some last minute gift ideas for Hanukkah, Christmas, Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa or New Year’s.

Heck, these make great hostess gifts, thank-you gifts, or birthday gifts, especially if someone’s birthday falls smack dab in the middle of all of these holidays (ahem).

Gifts under $20

Gifts to $50

Gifts to $100

Gifts over $100

The usual disclaimer: Listing does not imply endorsement of any product or vendor.

Announcements

Happy 2nd Birthday To Us!

Today our blog turns two years old! In the spirit of Thanksgiving we wish to thank all of our readers and colleagues for helping us make this blog successful. It’s been a great two years filled with weird and wonderful things.

Our birthday wish? to continue to bring you more news and views from the Lower Level, and to engage our readers in more conversations.

What kinds of posts do you like to read? What don’t you know about our work that we can highlight? What drives you to respond to a blog post? Oatmeal spice cake left over from yesterday’s feast counts as a fiber-filled breakfast item, right?

Image from “Two African Trips With Notes and Suggestions on Big Game Preservation in Africa,” by Edward North Buxton (1902). This item is in the lab so that we can fix the large fold-out map that accompanies the text.

Conservation, What's In The Lab

What’s In The Lab: Peeling Eyeballs!

By Erin Hammeke, Conservator for Special Collections

The History of Medicine collections continue to delight us in Conservation as we work to stabilize some of the most-used items. I just finished repairing Bartisch’s Ophthalmodouleia, das ist Augendienst:…, a work on Ophthalmology printed in 1583.

This item was recently featured in the exhibit, Anamated Anatomies. In addition to depicting some interesting and seemingly painful eye treatments and surgeries of the 16th century, the book contains two pages of hand-colored anatomical flaps.

I repaired a page that depicts the anatomy of the eye in layers. Like many of the flap books we have examined, the flaps were fragile and showed signs of damage from use. The eyeball flaps had received several previous repairs, including a fairly early shellac seal repair.

For this treatment, I removed one of the previous repairs that was poorly placed and causing damage to the outer flap, and I re-repaired it using tissue and wheat starch paste. I also stabilized the remaining flaps and flattened mis-folds using a light application of wheat starch paste.

Conservation, Quick Pic

Quick Pic: Stick A Flag On It

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We have these blue flags that our colleagues can use to alert us to damaged books. They are intended to be placed inside the damaged book and, or taped onto a bin if you have a bunch of things to send to the lab. They aren’t supposed to be taped TO the books themselves.

The lesson here is that care and handling training is never done. People forget, they get in a hurry, or they just plain don’t think things through. I’m sure the person that taped this flag to these books didn’t intend harm, they just didn’t think that tape could harm book covers.

Maybe this was a new student assistant and we haven’t caught them yet with our indoctrination care and handling training. To the Bat Mobile! We have work to do!!

Announcements, Collaboration

Happy Second Birthday Devil’s Tale!

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From the Gamble CollectionHappy Belated 2nd Birthday to our sister blog The Devil’s Tale. On October 8, 2009, TDT began their quest for blogging superstar-dom.

Reading The Devil’s Tale is a great way to connect to our special and archival collections as well as to our staff members. TDT’s posts (yeah Amy!) are insightful, educational and often humorous. Yes, librarians do have a sense of humor!

Without The Devil’s Tale, how would you know what new collections have come in? Or what  curious things the staff has found?

We know you want to know more about such things as gangrene and hair, don’t you? Yes you do! Surf on over to The Devil’s Tale and see what’s happening in the wild world of the Rubenstein Library.

 

Image “Two Betties” from the Sydney D. Gamble Photograph Collection, Rubenestein Library.

Preservation

Remembering Jan Merrill-Oldham

It is with great sadness that we report the passing of one of the greats in our field, Jan Merrill-Oldham. Jan passed away peacefully at home on October 5th.

As one colleague put it, “she was a force of nature.” Jan’s influence stretched across generations of preservation librarians and shaped what we know today as modern library and archives preservation practice.

Many stories will be told in the next few days of Jan’s perseverance, dedication, humor and humility. I have many stories myself, and will remember many more as I reflect on her life. The one thing I will always remember about Jan is her willingness to lend an ear even when she, herself, was going through a very difficult time. Jan loved life and she loved her work. She was one of the most dedicated people I know and I’m so thankful to her, and indeed to so many, for taking me under her wing. She will be sorely missed, but we will celebrate her life and then get back to work (and life) because that is what she would have wanted us to do.

Obituary for Jan Merrill-Oldham

Jan Merrill-Oldham died peacefully at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts  on October 5th 2011 . She is survived by her husband Peter Merrill-Oldham of Cambridge, her mother and father, Alice Cecarelli Merrill and James Hershy Merrill of Milford, CT, and her brother James Wallace Merrill of West Haven, CT.

Janice Elaine Merrill was born on May 10, 1947 in Milford Connecticut and lived there until she went to college, spending most of her summers with her grandparents Ed and Esther Trask in East Sumner, ME. She graduated from Jonathan Law High School in Milford in 1965 and from the University of Connecticut in Storrs in 1969. She married Peter Oldham in 1976 in Ashford, CT, and in 1978 they changed their last names to Merrill-Oldham.

As the Malloy-Rabinowitz Preservation Librarian at Harvard University, Jan directed the Weissman Preservation Center in the Harvard University Library and the Preservation & Imaging Services Department in the Harvard College Library from November 1995 to February 2010. She created and administered a comprehensive program to preserve and enhance access to the 16.5 million volumes and extensive special collections and archives held in Harvard’s more than 70 libraries.

Jan became interested in the preservation of library collections while working in the bindery at the University of Connecticut Library. In 1979, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Yale University Library allowed Jan to undertake formal training in library and archives preservation. She went on to earn a Masters in Library Science from the University of Rhode Island and to establish the University of Connecticut Libraries’ Preservation Department.

Over the course of 30 years, Jan became a recognized national and international leader in the field of library and archives preservation. Eager to learn and insatiably curious, she was an extraordinary teacher, mentor, author and administrator. Early on, her vision for libraries led her to move beyond the work of simply preserving collections to reformatting them for access via the Internet. Jan exercised her formidable powers of persuasion with university administrators, commercial suppliers, and by serving on key committees within the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the National Information Standards Organization and many others. She authored and edited more than 40 publications.

Jan’s powerful influence within her profession was widely recognized. In 2011, the Association of Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) and the Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) of ALA created a professional development grant in her honor. She also received the ALA/ALCTS Ross Atkinson Lifetime Achievement Award (2011), the ALA/PARS Banks Harris Award (1994), a University of Connecticut Distinguished Service Award (1994) and the ALA/PARS Esther Piercy Award (1990).

Jan was one of those rare people who not only changed her profession but also the lives of the many family members, friends and colleagues who came to love and respect her. A memorial ceremony will be held at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Saturday October 15the at 1 pm in the Storey Chapel, followed by a reception celebrating her life at Pete and Jan’s home in Cambridge.

In lieu of flowers, donations in Jan’s memory may be made to the Circle of Caring at Hospice of the Good Shepherd 617.969.6130