Category Archives: Boxing Day

1091 Project, Boxing Day

1091 Project: Making Enclosures

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This month the 1091 project is all about enclosures. Boxes. Wrappers. Tuxedos. Clams. You name it, we make it. In fact, last fiscal year we fitted or made over 8,500 enclosures. We love boxes so much we created Boxing Day, which has grown to two days a month.

I’ve written before about why we create enclosures for our materials. In short it is to protect books from abrasion, dust and light exposure. We also make boxes for artifacts from the collections so that they can safely be put onto a shelf. Most recently these have included a gravestone, death mask, and a teeny tiny Thai Village.

We choose the style of enclosure based on the condition, size, and weight of the object as well as how and how often it is used. Below are the common enclosures we make, listed from the minimum to maximum amount of protection they provide.

 

CoLibri Book Jacket CoLibri Book Jacket

We primarily use these polyethylene book jackets for our New & Noteworthy, Duke Authors and Lilly Current Literature books.  CoLibri covers make it possible to save publisher’s dust jackets, which often contain unique information such as author biographies and cover art . These take about 3-5 minutes to make.

 

 

EnvelopesEnvelope (buffered paper or Tyvek)

Envelopes provide a minimum of protection for fragile items such as pamphlets. They are inexpensive, easy and quick. For very thin items we will add a stiffener made of a piece of blue-corrugated board or blue-white board.

If the item is very brittle, we will add a folded piece of card stock (folded at the bottom edge) to act as a sling to help get the item out safely. An envelope only takes a couple of minutes to fit and label.

 

Four Flap BoxesFour flap (aka Tuxedo or Tux box)

These are made of 10 or 20 point buffered card stock and are best for small, lightweight items that are between 1/4″ and 1″ thick. They provide protection from light and abrasion and are good for brittle materials or for books with loose boards.

These take on average 10 minutes to make and these (as are the following boxes) are custom cut and folded to fit the book’s exact dimensions.

 

Mylar Spine BoxesMylar Spine Four Flap (aka “peekaboo box”)

Not knowing if an item is inside is a common complaint about boxing books. A good solution is this one, a variation on the traditional four flap but with a polyester spine. While they do tend to have a bit of a gap at the head and tail, they do allow you to see the contents. These boxes obviously do not provide protection from light  so they are best for locations that are kept dark except when in use. These take about 10-15 minutes to make.

 

Phase Box

Phase boxes, also called “button and string boxes” are perfect for items that need to be restrained to keep them flat. We put vellum-bound materials in these sorts of boxes to keep them from warping. These average 15 minutes to make.

 

Drop Spine BoxesDrop Spine Box (aka Clam Shell)

We make these from buffered corrugated board (also called blue clams or “pizza boxes”; bottom of photo) or we make them from binders board and cover them in book cloth (also called “cloth clam”; top of photo).

These provide the most protection for the books inside. They are good for larger, heavier items and for special bindings (e.g. metal clasps, embroidered bindings, etc.). The corrugated boxes take about 15 minutes to make. Depending on their size or complexity the cloth clams can take 90 minutes or more.

Notice the “Return to Conservation after use” sticker on the blue clam. We started putting these on items that we get from Technical Services prior to shelving. This has been a very successful workflow and allows us to provide a box for newly acquired, fragile items while deferring their treatment until they are used. So far we have gotten several back. It’s nice to see patrons using new books in the collection.

 

American Newspaper Repository bound volumesPre-made Boxes

We also use a lot of pre-made boxes especially for standard sized manuscript collections or brittle, bound newspapers. Sometimes we need to customize a standard box because the item inside may be a little too small to fit exactly and we don’t want it “swimming” around in the box. In this image, a standard box is given a custom-cut blue-corrugated board insert to keep the brittle newspaper from moving around in the box as it is transported. The papyri rehousing project is a good example of a hybrid project that combines commercially available boxes with custom inserts.

 

Creating enclosures is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Very often you find yourself having to bring all your skills and experience to a project in order to create something to fit the project’s unique needs.

You can see more interesting boxing projects on our Flickr page. Let’s go over to Parks Library Preservation to see what kind of enclosures they create for their collections.

 

 

Boxing Day

Papyri Rehousing Project Begins

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A while ago we were trying to come up with a new housing strategy for our papyri collection. We finally moved the project from the conceptual stage to the production stage last week!

The collection is currently housed in oversized boxes with only a slip of blotter or paper between the glass packets. The papyri “swim” around in the boxes and rub against each other and knock against the sides of the boxes. The arrangement makes finding a particular papyrus difficult, and can lead to damage as you have to shift the contents to find the one you want.

We needed a solution that would protect each individual papyrus, would be easy to find in the box, would be easy to transport through the stacks to the reading room, and that conveyed a message that these materials needed to be handled with care.

Our strategy is to make an individual folder for each item using two sheets of mat board that are hinged together with Tyvek tape. Inside the folder is a custom-fit Volara foam insert that fits snugly around the glass packet.

 

 

 

Each folder is labeled with a picture-label so that a quick visual match can be done at the desk to ensure the correct papyri is in the folder. In this image you can clearly see the shape of the papyrus in the photo above.

 

 

 

Each folder is cut to the size of the new boxes so that they don’t “swim” around in the box. Seven papyri fit inside a box, which makes these considerably less heavy than the old boxes. If an item was removed to an oversize box, we put a piece of blue-corrugated in its place with a note that it was moved.

 

 

The new boxes are temporarily labeled with a green sticky-note to identify the contents. We anticipate that some items will need to be moved to oversize boxes, and some shifting will have to occur as we go through the collection. We decided to make the labels at the end of the project when the physical arrangement was finalized. I expect that part to be pretty time consuming, but we will cross that bridge later.

We got through about 175 items on our first Boxing Day. The spreadsheet lists about 1800 papyri, but some have writing on both recto and verso and therefor were entered twice in our database. The other benefit to this project is we will have a complete inventory once we are done.

 

Boxing Day, Conservation, What's In The Lab

Quick Pic: President Few’s Death Mask

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William Preston Few death mask
Death Mask of William Preston Few from the collections of the Duke Unviersity Archives.

Here lies the death mask of Duke University President William Preston Few (1910-1940).

His head is in the lab having recently been on exhibit. It’s existing enclosure wasn’t providing adequate protection for the delicate plaster, so Jennifer is building an enclosure for it.

It’s creeping us all out.

 

Boxing Day, Conservation, Quick Pic

Quick Pic: Frightening Finds

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Nothing quite gets you thanking your lucky stars that you live in the 21st Century as working with the History of Medicine Collection in the David M. Rubenstein Library.

We have been helping to retrofit the boxes containing historic medical instruments in preparation of our move to swing space for the next phase of renovation.

We had a good time playing a game I call, “what in the world is this thing  and what body part does it apply to?” Depending on your “ick” tolerance it can be a fun game. Do you want to take a guess at what this is?

Boxing Day, Collaboration, What's In The Lab

It Takes A Village To House A Village

The Doris Duke Archives recently sent us this “Tiny Thai Village” for boxing. Read about its history on The Devil’s Tale.

The TTV came in a small box with all of the models inside. Obviously a box half the size of a Twinkie would disappear in the stacks and make access difficult. While these models aren’t fragile per se, they are delicate and the little houses had no real protection.

Our goals for the final housing were three-fold

  • The new enclosure had to be big enough to go to the stacks
  • Each little house needed its own compartment for safety and security
  • You needed to be able to lift out each model with your giant fingers

Experimental Box-making
I thought this would be easy, but it took a lot of trial and error to figure it out. I grabbed a standard Metal-Edge box meant to house cabinet cards and started experimenting. Here’s what I did:

  • Created a tray with a compartment for each house
  • Built up the inside so that the models would be level with the top of the box
  • Inset the original box so it was at the same level as the models
  • Lined the lid with Volara to provide a cushion should they get shaken
  • Labeled the box with big “Fragile-Do Not Tilt” labels

The Final Box
While each model can still move around in its compartment, they don’t knock into each other and you can still get your fingers in to take them out. You can also quickly tell if one is missing since each compartment should be occupied.

Although I would likely do something a bit different if I were asked to house this again, I think this enclosure achieves the goals and will provide more protection than the original box.

Boxing Day, Conservation, What We Find In Books

What We Find In Books: Leaves of Grass (and other formerly green things)

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This book was sent down to Conservation for an enclosure. Inside were many, many pressed leaves and bits of ferns. We couldn’t leave them in the text as they were staining the paper, but we were hesitant to just remove them due to their provenance. Jennifer devised this clever solution to removing the leaves but saving the information about where they were in the book.

Each set of leaves was encapsulated with a tag that says where in the book they were found. The set of encapsulations are inside a small folder, and both the folder and book are inside a beautiful new box.

For more images from the Conservation lab, visit our Flickr site.

Boxing Day, Conservation

No Smoking In The Library (Plus a Lesson Learned)

A couple of weeks ago we got a box from Technical Services labeled “tobacco samples.” Obviously, these needed something more than Zip Loc bags before going to the shelf.

Still riding the success of boxing the Blue Devil, I got out the CoLibri pockets and enclosed each sample in a pouch. Then I made a blue-corrugated tray with multiple compartments to contain the various packages of tobacco.

The result: the tobacco is contained but accessible for viewing without all of the loose tobacco getting everywhere. The CoLibri pouches can be easily removed if we want to exhibit these items in the future, which was a concern for the archivists. Overall, I think this was another successful non-traditional use of CoLibri.

The Lesson Learned: I made this great container, with even more little dividers than the one in the image in order to keep all the tobacco safe from rolling around.

I was so proud of my solution and showed the box to everyone in the lab. They all smiled and praised their boss for actually making something. Then I tried to put the lid on the box….and I made the tray to fit the lid of the box rather than the base of the box. DOH! Humble pie, meet fork.

Boxing Day, Conservation

A Very Big Challenge

I think this is the biggest box I’ve tried to make, it’s for a Torah that was recently on exhibit and needs to go back to RBMSCL.

I’m experimenting with using double-walled corrugated board rather than binders board since it has strength but not weight. The board surface is easily marred but with the book cloth adhered it seems pretty solid. I’m going with a telescoping design, that is a smaller tray that has aslightly larger lid that fits over it.

What I’m not sure of yet is the design of the lid. The base is too big to make a lid from one piece of board, so I will have to cobble something together. I’m also considering experimenting with a polyester lid so you can see into the box. Nothing will be stored on top of this box, so having a sturdy lid may not be an issue, but would it provide enough protection? More thought is needed. Luckily the next few days are chock full of meetings, so I’ll have time to mull it over.