Category Archives: Conservation

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?

Conservation, job announcement

Conservation Technician Position Announced

Conservation Tech, Library Assistant

(1 Year Term Appointment)

Under the general supervision of the Head of Conservation, creates custom enclosures and performs minor treatments for the repair and rehousing of special collections materials. S/he works with members of the Conservation Services Department to prepare materials for moving items off site and to temporary swing space as part of the Perkins renovation project.

For a complete job description and instructions for applying, click here.

 

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.

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!!

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.

Conservation

What would you do with it?

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Removing prior repairs is one of those topics that elicits a lot of opinions from conservators (get four conservators around a table and you will have six opinions on the matter).

As often is the case, my answer to removing a prior repair is usually “it depends.” Is the repair damaging the item or simply aesthetically a mess? How damaging would the removal be and how much more damage are you willing to incur to remove it? What is the value and use of the item and how do these weigh with the physical risk to the item that the repair or its removal pose?

Do you hate it because it is just ugly? is that enough reason to remove it? If it is functioning but ugly, can you live with it?

I found this item in our stacks today. We must remember that not all items in our special collections started out as “special,” many started in the general collections and old-style repairs were not always aesthetically pleasing or reversable (things we strive for now). I suspect this may be the case for this particular item.

What I hate about this repair is that the black book tape is downright ugly. What I love about it is that the person who did it cared enough to write in the part of the title that was covered by the book tape. This is one we probably wouldn’t remove unless we had a better reason than “it’s ugly.” But then again…

Thanks to Noah Huffman for the image as I was caught without my camera in the stacks.