This scribal copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence will soon travel for exhibition at the Museum of the American Revolution. A declaration of independence by the army of black Haitians from French colonial rule made 1804, the original document strongly echoes the rhetoric of the American Revolution three decades earlier. It established the first black republic in the world.
High quality images of each page are available in the Duke Digital Repository: https://repository.duke.edu/dc/haitideclaration/hdims01001
Duke’s copy of the Declaration was found in the papers of Jean Baptiste Pierre Aime Colheux de Longpré, a French colonizer of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) who fled the country during its revolution and settled in New Orleans around 1812. The manuscript was very likely made shortly after the Declaration took effect. Few known contemporary manuscript copies are available to scholars, residing at the British Library, the French National Archives, and the National Library of Jamaica. For more background on the history and scholarship of this important document, see Julia Gaffield’s 2014 article in The Appendix.
Before any item from the collection is loaned to another institution, it undergoes thorough examination and documentation. This manuscript is written on light blue laid paper, which is traditionally manufactured by hand using a woven wire mould. Wire moulds often include a watermark from the paper mill, made by sewing wire into a design through the mould. Leonie Müller, from Harvard Museums, has written a good explainer of the process with images. Watermarks in paper can give a lot of information about the place and date of its manufacture.
Since the wires from the paper mould leave the paper slightly thinner above them during the paper making process, transmitted light can be used to clearly see the laid and chain lines, as well as any watermarks. I place the manuscript on a light table and was able to clearly see watermarks on the left and right side of the sheet.On the left side of the sheet, the words “AL MASSO” are visible. This is referring to the Al Masso paper mill, which was formed in 1782 in the city of Pescia, Italy.
On the right side of the sheet, you can see a crown-topped shield crest, featuring a bird and stone tower. The words “GIORo MAGNANI” are visible beneath it, referring to Giorgio Magnani. Magnani formed the Al Masso mill in partnership with Antonio Arrigoni. The Bernstein Consortium has some photos of the same watermark here that better show some of the details.
Pescia became known in Tuscany for papermaking as early as the thirteenth century. Due to an abundance of running water in the area, the city hosted hundreds of paper mills and by the nineteenth century became an important site of industrialization in the region. The Magnani family has been producing paper since the fifteenth century and continues to do so today.
By closely examining items in the library collection, we can start to piece together more information about their origin and manufacture from seemingly small details.
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.
We are delighted to welcome our sixth HBCU Library Alliance intern, Angela Nettles, to Duke Libraries. Angela is a rising senior at Bennett College where she is studying Africana Women’s Studies. She is also one of eight students studying preservation this summer through the University of Delware/HBCU-LA internship program. As a part of the program, she will spend four weeks with us learning everything from binding pamphlets to conducting condition surveys.
After two years of presenting this program online, it’s refreshing to have our intern onsite again. So far, this first week has been a busy one. In addition to her bi-weekly cohort meetings, Angela has dived right into work here at Perkins Library.
From left to right: Meg Brown (Head of Exhibition Services), Angela Nettles, and Yoon Kim (Senior Library Exhibition Technician) after working on the Mandy Carter exhibitPlacing case labels and adjusting exhibit lights.
As you can imagine, there was a lot to be done. Regardless, Angela was up to the many tasks at hand. From sanding the walls to setting up exhibit cases, she eagerly took part in every step of the process.
Left: Sanding the walls to prep them for the new Phototex graphics that were going up. Right: Meg Brown showing Angela how they measure light in exhibitions for preservation purposes.
Additionally, the second half of the week was spent introducing Angela to my work in the conservation lab. She learned about how we make treatment decisions for general collections, and has already started doing treatments herself.
Angela finishing her first pocket (left) and binding music scores into pamphlet binders (right).
So far she is a quick study and has already picked up how to do tip-ins, pockets, and pamphlet bindings.
Longtime readers will remember the banana book, one of the best worst things that has come to the lab over the last 20 years. It has made its return to the Preservation Exhibit Case in our new exhibit, “SOS–Save Our Stuff: How you can help preserve library collections.” The exhibit is viewable during regular library hours on Lower Level 1, outside the Verne and Tanya Roberts Conservation Lab (Perkins 023).
The banana book is just one of several uniquely damaged items on display. Want to see what happens when you use sticky notes? Or attempt DIY book repairs? Come on down!
As mentioned last week, staff in the Collections Services division have been creating a “behind the scenes” look at the work we do to get books to the shelf. The exhibit is now up! Come see a selection of the work we do to make sure the book you need is on the shelf when you need it.
Over the past year, I’ve been working on an exhibit revolving around the work I do in Conservation Services and the Collection Services Division as a whole. As luck would have it, Beth has this wonderful miniature book press that fit perfectly into the display case I was in charge of designing.
But what is a book press without a book to press? With that in mind, I took this opportunity to make my first miniature book.
First, I made a tiny book block.
I left the paper longer than it needed to be so that I could weigh the pages down while I sewed it all together. Once that was done, I decided it would be nice to try and round the spine. This proved to be a bit difficult with the normal tools we use for rounding.
I felt I was more likely to just crush the entire spine with the hammer than actually round it. A Teflon folder made for a safer option for this tiny spine.
Next, I needed to trim the book block to a more appropriate size. I started to cut it with just a scalpel and a ruler, but as you can see that wasn’t really going well or looking particularly nice.
I decided instead to try to trim the book in a more traditional method. This meant placing the book block into a press and using a sharp, flat blade to cut across the pages evenly.
This was much more successful and I ended up with a nice and neat book block.
After that, I covered the spine with a Japanese tissue for strength. Then I added a textile spine lining as well as a paper lining for additional support.
Now I could make the covers, which ended up being the easiest part of this whole process.
The hardest part came next, which was casing the book block into the covers. Because the book is so tiny, it was difficult to make sure the book didn’t move out of place as I glued up the paper that would connect the book block to the covers.
I eventually managed to figure it out and put the book in a press to dry flat.
I have to say it looks a bit silly in the full-sized press.
But once it was dry, the book was done!
It certainly fits in much better with a press its own size.
You can check out this tiny press with its tiny book, along with the rest of the great displays my colleagues put together, in the exhibit The Library Uncovered: Behind the Scenes with Collection Services that is currently open to the public in the Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery in Perkins.
Despite the library (and campus in general) feeling very quiet and empty this past year, there has actually been a lot going on. Library exhibits are no exception and there are currently two really wonderful shows up and available by appointment in the building. Plans are already underway for bigger and more exciting events in the fall. This very large and sturdy crate containing a loan for an upcoming show just arrived this week. Stay tuned for more details!
One of the silver linings of business travel being suspended for the foreseeable future is that so many conferences have gone virtual this year. This has provided a number of opportunities to experience the meetings of professional groups outside my usual repertoire. This week I’ve been really enjoying the International Mountmakers Forum. The organization has been very generous to record and upload the talks to Youtube.
Mounting objects for exhibition can be very challenging, and I have learned about new materials and techniques this week that could be used in the gallery spaces in our library.
The success of virtual conferencing during that pandemic gives me hope that this kind of programming will remain available, even when the world has returned to normal. Conferences are an essential fundraising opportunity for many professional organizations, and there can be financial disincentives for the organization in making content too freely available. At the same time, there are many professionals working in cultural heritage institutions or in private practice who do not have access to funding for professional development and are cut off from the debates and interactions that happen at these meetings. I’ve been very impressed with the way our professional organizations have adapted in the last year and I look forward to continued innovation and greater inclusion using these same systems in years to come.
It’s a hard to believe, but over a year ago now I posted about our new method for documenting collection material going on loan. I’ve learned a lot about the technology in that time and would like to share some of those lessons, in case others are considering adopting the method. While the system I described back then did work well to document the necessary information on a compressed schedule, ultimately some of the tools present problems for reformatting and long-term digital storage of the reports.
In my previous post, I outlined some of the benefits of using Microsoft OneNote for generating reports:
Full access to the software is included in our institution’s Office 365 license.
It seamlessly works with other Microsoft products, like Excel, which we often use to manage collection metadata for projects.
Annotation of images can be done right inside the application. When off-site, it was very quick to photograph objects using the Surface Book’s camera and make drawings directly in the report.
Organization of pages and visually managing the workflow is easy. I applied a standard naming convention to each report and then organized them into sections based on their status within the project. Kind of like a Kanban board.
While creating and using documentation inside OneNote worked well, getting that same information out without disruption presents a bit of a problem. I think a lot of these issues stem from the way the application handles page layouts and images inside pages.
A new page defaults to an “auto” size, which is essentially a standard page width with infinite length. This allows you to create a document of whatever size you need and, at first, seems pretty great.
How finished reports look inside OneNote.
When the page is exported as a PDF or printed, the application inserts page breaks as needed. Sometimes this works out, but more often I found that the images are broken up.
That same report exported to PDF. Notice the page breaks and image shift under the annotations.
My first thought for resolving this was to set the page size as standard letter and carefully lay out the report to fit within the margins of each sheet. Surprisingly though, a “page” within OneNote can’t contain multiple “sheets”. When your report gets longer than the standard 11″ of page height, the content just starts to move off into a grey void.
A report inside a Letter-sized page, with content running off the page. Image shift also occurred when the sheet size was changed.
When you convert this page to a PDF, page breaks are inserted in the same way they would be for an “auto” sized page. I’m puzzled why the application was designed this way.
Another major problem I found was that the horizontal position of the image tends to shift slightly left when the the page is exported or printed (see examples above). The is extremely frustrating, when you’ve taken great care to put your annotations in specific locations and I could not find a way to fix it. Unlike a lot of other Office products, the image and overlaid annotations can’t be grouped in OneNote. I have found two workarounds for this problem after the report is converted to a PDF:
Luckily, the annotations remain in the same position to one another. If the image isn’t split by a page break, I was able to use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to edit the PDF and just slide the underlying image back into place under the annotations.
If the image was split by page breaks, I found it quicker to use the Snipping Tool in Windows to copy the image and annotations out of OneNote in the correct orientation and save them as a single JPG. I would then delete the fragmented image and annotations out of the PDF report with Acrobat Pro and replace them with the snipped image.
Obviously, these workarounds come with the additional cost of an Adobe (or other PDF editor) license.
The fixed report PDF
In light of these issues, how will my approach to loan documentation change in the future? Some key aspects will remain the same. For example, the Surface Book 2 performs very well for writing the report and creating accurate image annotations. I also think the overall design of the form was good.
A major change will be to annotate images in a separate application and save them as a derivative image file. This will take some additional time to set up on the front end, but will create fewer issues further down the pipe. I have created a draft template in Adobe Photoshop, which contains my photo documentation of the item and a standard annotation key in separate layers. The automation tools within Photoshop could be used to create batches of these annotation-ready images for large numbers of loan items at once.
Photoshop template with photodoc and annotation key in separate layers.
For future loans, I will also retire Microsoft OneNote from the workflow. It is important that we be able to easily convert our documentation to PDF and print a hard copy for preservation purposes. OneNote’s export problems, particularly for annotated images, require a lot of time and effort to correct on the back end. The useful features, like check boxes and timestamps, are not an equal trade off. What software will replace it? I don’t know for certain yet, but it will definitely be a word processing application where content stays in position during printing and export! Microsoft Word will probably be fine, but we could also probably use Google Docs. I think the composing application matters less with the annotations saved in a single image file.
On the left side of the sheet, the words “AL MASSO” are visible. This is referring to the Al Masso paper mill, which was formed in 1782 in the city of Pescia, Italy.
On the right side of the sheet, you can see a crown-topped shield crest, featuring a bird and stone tower. The words “GIORo MAGNANI” are visible beneath it, referring to Giorgio Magnani. Magnani formed the Al Masso mill in partnership with Antonio Arrigoni. The Bernstein Consortium has some photos of the same watermark here that better show some of the details.
