Everywhere you turn lately it seems like tech companies are adding some kind of AI feature to their software. Sometimes these updates are incredibly useful. Other times… not so much.
We discovered that Microsoft Word will now automatically generate Alt Text (alternative text) descriptions of the images you insert into your documents after it described an Ethiopic scroll as a roll of toilet paper. Clearly the robots have some training to do on cultural heritage materials.
Alternative text is important for making documents more accessible and we make every effort to add it when we can. I’m sure this automatically generated text is accurate enough for stock images and maybe will improve over time, but for the treatment and handling documentation we create it’s really only good for a laugh. We have turned it off rather than risk some ridiculous description being saved in our work. Just open the Options menu and look for either Accessibility or Ease of Access (depending on your version) to silence the machines.
Virginia Woolf’s writing desk has been an important fixture in the library’s exhibit suite since it opened after the renovation in 2015. The standing desk with an angled writing surface was designed and commissioned by Virginia Woolf in the early 1900s and resided first in Asheham, then in Monks House. In the 1920s the desk was painted by Woolf’s nephew, Quentin Bell, and the legs were later shortened by his wife, Olivier. The plinth on which the desk now rests restores the writing surface to its original height.
The desk has been a focal point of the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery, a smaller gallery space positioned at the back of the suite of three rooms. Recently, Woolf’s desk has been relocated to a more prominent home: the window alcove between Rubenstein Library’s Photography Gallery and Reading Room.
This space is the perfect size for the desk and will allow more visitors to safely experience and learn about this important object.
Prior to moving the desk, we spent a couple of months monitoring the environment inside the alcove. We have been carefully looking at the environmental conditions inside each of the exhibit galleries for a long time, so we have a good understanding of the intervals and degree of change in temperature and relative humidity in those spaces. The Stone gallery is very stable, being positioned behind doors and the other exhibit rooms. The photography gallery experiences more fluctuations due to its proximity to exterior doors. Longtime readers may recall our 2018 experiment to monitor the environment inside frames.
We have environmental data from the center of the reading room, but none from the alcove itself. It seemed best to position one of our Onset HOBO MX1101 data loggers right at the height of the desk, rather than on the floor and I didn’t want to cause any damage to the wood paneling on the walls. The MX loggers have magnets on the back, which are extremely useful for deploying them in the stacks, but no metal surfaces are available nearby. Luckily I was able to find some plastic hooks that could be used to attach the HOBO directly to the glass.
The hook pivots and, as you rotate it down into position, creates additional suction inside the cup. The manufacturer indicates these hooks can hold up to 5lbs, so they are strong enough to hold a data logger. The suction does diminish over time, however. I found that they failed after about 2 months, so I did have to reset the hook about half-way through the monitoring period.
The MX data loggers have built in mounting loops, but they weren’t big enough to fit the end of the hook – so I created a short chain with textile tapes to put them in the right orientation. Anticipating that photo gallery visitors or researchers inside the reading room might be curious about a small device hanging on the glass, I attached small labels on either side of the data logger to explain its purpose.
After collecting environmental data for the space for several months, we were assured that the alcove was a good space for the desk to live. We hope that more visitors to the library can enjoy this important piece of literary history.
Much of the news this week is dominated by either underwater ship wrecks or inflation. After doing a little research about an early 20th century literary magazine that came across my bench, I discovered that one advertisement serendipitously intersects both of those topics.
This copy of The Bookman came in for some minor repairs before going on exhibit. The covers are the main advertising spaces for this publication and mostly feature some pretty dull descriptions of books available from George H. Doran or Harcourt, Brace and Company. It being June, the image of a steam ship and “Ideal Summer Vacations” advertised on the back really caught my eye.
Eight days in Bermuda for only $90 sounds really nice, but was it a good deal in 1924? The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Inflation Calculator estimates that sum to be the same as around $1600 today. That seems like a reasonable amount to spend on a long cruise; however, after a quick search I discovered that many of the major cruise lines today are offering the same voyage for less than half of that price. Cruises (at least to Bermuda) have beat inflation!
I’m sure the accommodations on the modern vessels are a lot more comfortable than a hundred year old steam ship, too. In reading about the ships listed in the advertisement, I discovered that they both ended up sinking. The Fort St. George was destroyed by British aircraft during WWII, while the Fort Victoria only sailed another 5 years from the date of this ad before being struck by another ship and sinking in New York Harbor. The wreckage was later dynamited to prevent it damaging to other boats. Luckily all of the Victoria’s passengers were rescued by the Coast Guard before she sank.
This spring has been pretty busy and keep forgetting to post an update on “Large Marge“, our new standing press. She had been in storage for a while before arriving here and needed a bit of TLC before we could start using her. We also needed some help from our colleagues in Facilities to create a modification for the base.
After vacuuming off the cobwebs and giving all the parts a quick brushing, I wanted to address the rust that had started accumulating on the base and support rods.
BeforeAfter
The rust was pretty superficial, so I was able to remove it with steel wool. I applied a thin layer of Bowling Alley Wax to all of the surfaces to prevent further oxidation.
Before and after scrubbing and waxing.
The next thing that needed addressing was lubricating the threads of the large screw. The grease inside the threaded flange was still functional, but all of the lubricant exposed to air had completely dried out. I found the easiest way to remove it was to scrape it off the threads with a micro-chisel.
Scraping off the old grease
Once the screw was clean, I added some new lithium grease and then raised and lowered the platen a couple of times to spread it across the threads evenly.
The most important addition to Marge was a modification to the base. These presses were designed for edition work with many books being stacked between pressboards and loaded in at once. This means that with the platen in its lowest position, there is still about 30″ of daylight between the base and platen. Since we are only pressing one item at a time, we needed to raise that bottom surface up.
Thankfully one of the carpenters in Duke’s Facilities Management Department was able to build a box that fits exactly inside the gap. The box is reinforced to withstand the full strength of the press, even when someone is using the extended arm to tighten it. An added bonus is that all of the pressboards can be stored inside.
I’m looking forward to putting this press to use, particularly for building clamshell boxes for folio and double folio-sized books. Books of that size are often very heavy and difficult to move around, so they can benefit from the added protection of a cloth-covered enclosure.
On Tuesday, Libraries Assembly put together a really great passport event for staff to learn more about the different departments and groups within our organization. Eighteen groups volunteered to set up a table with information and activities:
Adopt-a-Highway Team
Center for Data and Visualization Sciences
Conservation Services
Data and Reporting Learning Group
DivE-In Council
Divinity Library
East Campus Libraries (Lilly and Music)
Family History and Genealogy Research Guide and the Genealogy@Duke Team
Ford Library (Business)
Knitting Club
Law Library
Libraries Assembly
Libraries Summer Camp
Medical Center Library and Archives
Munch & Mull Digital Scholarship Group
Where in the World am I from (International Area Studies)
We were there to distribute our new bookmarks, branded buttons, and instruct visitors in simple pamphlet binding.
The library staff who attended were given a passport with space for each group to stamp (or in our case draw a little doodle in highlighter). They were then able to enter their completed passport for prizes in a raffle.
It was a really great way to spend an hour and interact with our peers. We have welcomed many new staff over the last year, so it was nice to meet some of the new folks. It was also a great opportunity to catch up with colleagues from all of the different libraries around campus. Hopefully this will become an annual event!
We recently got this 1881 map of Durham in the lab and spent time comparing old streets and buildings to what’s currently on those locations.
We were especially interested in the large plot of land on Dillard Street owned by Julian Carr. The map shows many little winding paths on the property.
We wondered if it was a park or a cemetery, but no, it was just a huge personal estate. We found some great information on the Open Durham website including pictures of the beautiful original homes built on that site.
Waverly Manor (Courtesy Durham County Library, via Open Durham)
The original large homes are long gone, replaced by a number of commercial buildings in the 1920s, then a surface parking lot in 2008, and now a large hole in the ground.
A mixed-use development is currently planned for the block. Likely not as handsome as some of the previous structures, but at least a residence once again.
For the last few months, I have been working on cleaning and stabilizing a very large (25″ x 19″) and fascinating book.
This binding contains a collection of 83 engravings, in various sizes, by William Hogarth (1697 – 1764). This item was formerly owned by Frank Baker (1910-1999), a faculty member at Duke. Hogarth was an English artist known best for his satirical works depicting morality and social criticism. These works were first executed as paintings and then sold as engravings by subscription. The prints are remarkable and capture so many small details of English life in the 18th century. Interestingly, Hogarth’s work was so widely pirated that he fought to obtain copyright protection and the Copyright Act passed by Parliament in 1735 is known as the Hogarth Act.
In order to make these prints available to patrons, the book needed quite a bit of cleaning and mending. Several of the pages at the front and back were detached.
Before and after surface cleaning
The paper was so covered in surface grime that your fingers would become black from just turning pages, so I spent several weeks just surface cleaning everything. The resulting change was pretty dramatic.
With the tears along the edges mended, and the loose sheets reattached, this items is a little less daunting and safer to handle.
Many of the prints are large enough that they are simply sewn into the binding, but the smaller prints are mounted at the corners to larger sheets. Some of the smaller prints had become detached. Only a few of the prints in the volume have hand-applied color like plate 5 from ‘A Rake’s Progress‘ (above).
Loose prints were reattached with wheat starch paste.
During my initial review, I thought that the first of four plates in the Election series was torn along the top (or gutter of the binding).
Upon closer inspection though, I discovered that the Election plate was whole – this torn stub was from something else.
Dr. Baker’s typewritten inventory doesn’t list another print in this location and the numbers penciled on each page aren’t interrupted, so it seems like this one has been missing for quite a while. Looking at the details of exposed wooden rafters that are depicted, this fragment could be from one of Hogarth’s more famous works, “Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn”.
It is hard to know for sure, but we will be noting the fragment’s location in the catalog record.
Apart from mending and reattaching the prints themselves, I also spent some time flattening the original interleaving. The binder had included sheets of thin, laid paper by affixing them to the verso of each leaf using dots of red wax. The interleaving had become very badly creased, torn, and in some cases was missing entirely.
During treatment, I flattened and repaired the interleaving as much as possible. New loose interleaving sheets were added for the openings where original interleaving was missing or had major losses.
The top engraving above, titled “Tailpiece, or The Bathos”, is Hogarth’s last engraving, published just eight months before his death. It depicts the figure of Time exhaling his last breath among ruins. In the advertisements for this print that ran in the St James’s Chronicle for April 14, 1764, Hogarth wrote that it should “serve as a Tail-Piece to all the Author’s Engraved Works, when bound up together”.
The previous owner who had these prints collected and bound honored Hogarth’s wishes.
At first glance, though, it kind of looks like they were wearing matching crocheted outfits. I don’t know that such a thing has been done before, but based on the number of images I can find of crocheted chainmail and horses in sweaters, it seems entirely possible.
Today we welcomed a new resident to the lab. Everyone, meet our new T. W. & C. B. Sheridan Co. standing press!
Pictured here absolutely dwarfing our W.O. Hickok press.
We will need to clean the new Sheridan up a little before we can put her to use, but in the meantime we’ve decided to call her “Large Marge” in honor of the late Alice Nunn. Stay tuned for our forthcoming press glow-up!
Alternative text is important for making documents more accessible and we make every effort to add it when we can. I’m sure this automatically generated text is accurate enough for stock images and maybe will improve over time, but for the treatment and handling documentation we create it’s really only good for a laugh. We have turned it off rather than risk some ridiculous description being saved in our work. Just open the Options menu and look for either Accessibility or Ease of Access (depending on your version) to silence the machines.
