Category Archives: Preservation

CDA Episode 2: Prepping for Ingest

January 26, 2024 Henry Hebert

In the first blogpost of our series introducing the Conservation Documentation Archive (CDA), I wrote at length about the needs for creating documentation during our work and the various forms in which it takes. Unfortunately, ingesting those materials into the Duke Digital Repository was not as simple as migrating digital files from one platform to another. A lot of work went into preparing each record, and today I’d like to share some more of the details and considerations that went into that process.

Our “hard copy” documentation has always been stored in a filing cabinet, organized by fiscal year, with the files of each treatment contained in a paper folder. As record keeping practices and technology changed over the years, we began producing our reports and images digitally and saving them to shared network storage provided by the university. The digital files are similarly organized in folders by fiscal year and treatment number.

Preservation of our born-digital records has long been on our minds: it’s imperative that conservation treatment documentation persists for use by future custodians of the item (see AIC Guidelines for Practice #28 and commentary). Electronic records require regular, proactive maintenance in order to remain usable over long periods of time. The shared network drives are regularly backed up, but the integrity of the files are not checked as part of that process. If files were to become corrupted or deleted, we might not know for some time and our records could be lost.

Documents that are stored in a human-readable format, on the other hand, have advantages for long-term preservation. Their storage requirements are pretty minimal (a cool, dry place), and they require no active maintenance or special equipment to access them. AIC’s Guidelines for Practice state that if the maintenance of electronic documentation records cannot be ensured, the conservation professional must create and maintain hard copies of that documentation using the most permanent materials available (see Guideline #28, Commentary B). The adage often used in libraries and archives is “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”, abbreviated LOCKSS.

American Photocopy Equipment Company (1963)

Since we already have a method for storing hard copy records, we’ve been printing representative copies of our digital records and storing them in the filing cabinet. The reports are black and white electrostatic prints from our office copier (see Batterham, 2008). We also select a small number of representative before and after images, arrange them four to a page and then print them with pigment-based inks on Epson glossy photo paper using an Epson SureColor P800 inkjet printer.

The 35 mm slides in our legacy documentation are a bit of an exception. While they can be viewed with just a light source and magnification, special equipment is required in order to work with them easily. The colors of those slides have also shifted over time – and will continue to do so (Weidner 2012). “Benign neglect” isn’t a viable preservation strategy for this media.

The Duke Digital Repository offers a number of advantages over our past record storage strategies. Many of these are outlined in the Digital Preservation Policy, including regular monitoring of records for fixity and version control, maintenance of multiple copies in different locations, and control over who can edit, move, or delete materials and metadata. In addition to providing a better preservation environment, the digital repository also offers an improved mechanism for access by scholars using the collection. Rather than requesting a copy of paper records from our filing cabinet, library users can just view the records themselves online. In order to make that kind of access possible, however, we needed to get all of our documentation in order.

Our records underwent several phases of work to prepare them for ingest into the repository. Thanks to support from the Lyrasis Catalyst Fund, we were able to outsource the digitization of all of our legacy hard copy documentation, as well as hire a student worker and intern to assist with the large volume of file prep and metadata creation.

With digital records for all of our treatments in one place, we were able to perform a comprehensive review to ensure the files were correctly ordered and labeled. Reports were checked to ensure they were complete, images were rotated to the correct orientation, and a file naming convention was established. Some file formats are better for long-term preservation than others, so the raw DNG files and compressed JPEG derivatives were separated into subfolders; only the uncompressed TIFF images are ingested. Written reports were migrated to PDF format. If the report was born digital (rather than a scanned page), the documents were converted to accessible PDF and saved in the PDF/A format for better long-term preservation.

Once ingested, each treatment is organized as a single item in the digital collection, with the associated reports and digital images grouped together. We created metadata for each treatment to better identify and organize the records, and allow users additional access points. A title was created for each treatment, which includes the year the treatment was completed, a brief description of the work done, the workflow through which it came to the lab (if known), and the title of the item being treated (for example, “2016 board reattachment and tissue reback for instructional use of Athanasii Kircheri”). We also produced metadata to describe the culture or geography of the item’s origin, its condition, and the treatment techniques used. Whenever possible we adopted controlled vocabulary terms from the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) or Ligatus for all of these fields. Description for Duke’s other digital collections already rely on terms from the AAT. A unique identifier (either the BibSys number or archives collection identifier) was verified for each treatment in order to link the digital collection of documentation to the catalog record or finding aid for the item.

It’s important to note that some information or records are not represented in the CDA due to privacy or copyright issues. In all of our digitized reports, the signatures of employees have been redacted. While the email communication between conservators and curators that provides additional context for treatment decisions has been preserved, those files are suppressed from public view. Closed collections and items not owned by Duke University Libraries that we have documented (typically for exhibit loans) are also suppressed.

There was a lot of discussion in the media at the start of 2024 about copyright protections due to a certain culturally significant character entering the public domain. Shout-out to Jennifer Jenkins at Duke Law School for compiling a yearly roundup of works entering the public domain – it’s a really great read. Many of the items that we have treated are still under copyright protection, but there is a good fair use argument for making our treatment images of them available. The images are only used for scholarship, only small portions of copyrighted text are represented, etc. We ultimately decided to suppress certain treatment images of photographic collections, though, as they are fairly high resolution reproductions of the entire work. In those cases our reports are still available. See, for example, this condition assessment for an exhibit loan of a print from the Tom Rankin collection.

To date we have ingested around 1,400 records into the repository, which covers up to the 2016/17 fiscal year. At the moment we are hard at work preparing records from the next 3 fiscal years for ingest. Our eventual goal, once we are caught up, is to have a regular, annual release of records from the previous year.

We have heard that some of our colleagues are already using the CDA for research and instruction. In the next episode of this series, we will dive into the interface and look at some of the ways this collection can be used for research.

References:

American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. (1994). Code of ethics and guidelines for practice (pp. 6-10). https://www.culturalheritage.org/docs/default-source/resources/governance/organizational-documents/code-of-ethics-and-guidelines-for-practice.pdf
American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. (2008). Commentaries to the guidelines for practice of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works. https://www.culturalheritage.org/docs/default-source/resources/governance/organizational-documents/commentaries-to-the-guidelines.pdf
Batterham, I., & National Archives of Australia,. (2008). The office copying revolution: History, identification and preservation : a manual for conservators, archivists, librarians and forensic document examiners.
Weidner, T. (2012). Fading out: The end of 35mm slide transparencies. The Electronic Media Review, 2, 157 – 173. https://resources.culturalheritage.org/emg-review/volume-two-2011-2012/fading-out-the-end-of-35-mm-slide-transparencies/

Circulating collections care, Circulating collections care, Conservation, Events, Exhibits, HBCU internship, Preservation, Training, Uncategorized

Welcome to Our New Intern Angela Nettles

June 8, 2023 Jovana Ivezic

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.

To start, she spent the first half of the week assisting the Exhibition Department to set up the “Mandy Carter, the Scientist of Activism” exhibit.

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 exhibit

Placing 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.

Angela hit the ground running during the first week of her internship, and we have appreciated her enthusiasm to learn and try new things. We can’t wait to see what else she will accomplish during the rest of her time with us! You can read about the full cohort of interns on the HBCU-Library Alliance blog post. You can find posts from our past interns here.

Circulating collections care, Circulating collections care, Conservation, Preservation, What's In The Lab

Artistry in A Book of Colombian Poetry

April 21, 2023 Jovana Ivezic

Spanish is not my native language. Luckily, I can read it well enough to appreciate this compelling and solemn work by the Columbian poet Francia Elena Goenaga. The cover image does not reveal much about the nature of the book. However, the title reads “Babiuscas Para Niños Muertos Que No Pueden Dormir”, which translates to “Lullabies For Dead Children That Can’t Sleep”.

The title sets a tone that is quite somber. This is further highlighted by the subheading on the title page, which reads “Para los niños Colombianos que han sufrido violencia y sus madres”. This translates to “For the Colombian children who have suffered from violence and their mothers”. As dedications go, this is a specific and sentimental one. It inspires one to be pensive as they delve deeper into the book and read the poetry within.

Accompanying said poetry are a set of 14 illustrations that create an intriguing juxtaposition with the text.

Colorful studies of various dead birds appear throughout the book in striking detail. There is something to be said about comparing the visual of something dead to something sleeping. And since this is a book of “lullabies” in the form of poems, I find the choice to combine them with these illustrations remarkably provoking.

When a book this delicate and artistic come across my bench, I want to treat it delicately as well. As you may have noticed, this book was not originally bound.

It is too risky to send a book like this to the stacks since pages could be lost. The best solution for a book like this is to sew it into a pamphlet binder. Now our patrons can request this book and enjoy its artistry safely.

A close up on the sewing inside and the final product.

Conservation, Housing, Preservation, What's In The Lab

An Artist Book in a Conservation World

March 24, 2023 Jovana Ivezic

Here at Duke University Libraries, we’re fortunate to have a stunning collection of artist books from all over the world. Just like a regular book, artist books can come in a range of shapes and sizes. Some, however, come in more unusual shapes than most, which in turn can pose some interesting conservation questions.

One such book is the “Oubey: Mindkiss” book.

The Art

As you’ve probably noticed, this is not simply a book. “Oubey: Mindkiss” is made up of a sculptural slipcase containing five separate books.

Each book is devoted to the work of t late artist Oubey and is organized by the medium of the work or the time period the work was made.

The piece is clearly a work of art in itself. This is all the more evident by the fact that it has won multiple awards for its design. However, there are features of this item that have to be addressed from the view of a conservator, rather than one of an artist.

The Concerns

For one, the sculptural top of the slipcase consists of shapes and edges that are noticeably sharp. Pair that with the hard plastic material it’s made of, and you have an item that is bound to do some damage.

I am mostly referring to the damage the slipcase would do to any object placed beside it, but honestly this slipcase could probably hurt your hands as well if not handled carefully.

If this item were to sit as is on a shelf next to other items as normal, there is no way the stiff plastic edges wouldn’t eventually catch, snag, or tear the item beside it.

Another common problem with slipcases is how easily the books within them can fall out. These books are no exception due to the slippery, metallic material they are covered with. That combined with the equally slippery plastic case means the books have an especially high risk of sliding around.

Additionally, the plastic of the slipcase might be doing damage to the books inside of it over time. Although the books are still reflective and metallic (I provided proof in the following photo), if you look at the covers more closely you can see many horizontal scratch marks across the surface of each cover.

This observation is more of an assumption than a proven fact, but my guess is that these scratch marks are the result of the repetitive in and out motion of the books when they are removed or inserted in to the slipcase. The books fit rather snugly into the case, so they could be rubbing up against the inside whenever they move.

So, what can a conservation specialist do?

The Conclusion

Unfortunately, I can’t fix the issue regarding the covers of the books. Even if I knew how of a way treat metallic coatings (which I certainly don’t), something would still have to be done about the material of the slipcase rubbing up against the covers in the first place. An extreme solution would be to refrain from taking the books out of the slipcase at all, but then future readers would lose access to a significant portion of the information this item has to offer.

On a more positive note, something can be done about the nature of the slipcase. Luckily that solution is simple. We just make a box for it.

Does it feel a bit like hiding away a piece of art? Sure. However, as a library, one of our priorities is maintaining our collections while providing access to them. Making a box will protect our collections while also insuring that “Oubey: Mindkiss” is safer to handle for future patrons. And that’s a win for everyone.

Circulating collections care, Circulating collections care, Conservation, Housing, Preservation

We’re Going to Need a Bigger Box

January 20, 2023 Jovana Ivezic

After my recent dabbling in miniature book work, I felt it was only appropriate to switch things up and work on something large.

These two sizeable sets of East Asian books were exactly what I was looking for. Occasionally a set like this would be broken down into its individual books. However, since each set came with a unique cloth enclosure, they were cataloged as one whole item.

Therefore, I will treat each set as a single unit.

So, What is the Treatment?

I am glad that we are keeping the original enclosures, however it makes my job trickier. The current case doesn’t provide enough protection as it is. Even just a gentle push is enough to slide the books out of the enclosure, which could cause unwanted damage to the books in the set.

The best treatment option is to make each set a new box. That way the entire unit will be safer whenever it is transported or handled.

Normally this wouldn’t be anything new, but boxing something this tall is a first for me. The thickest books I’ve worked with were typically four or five inches thick as most. On the other hand, these two sets are a whopping nine and eleven inches tall.

Due to their size, a normal clamshell box is no longer an option. If I applied their dimensions to our usual clamshell design, the box would not fit on the sheets of E-Flute board that we have in the lab. The best solution to this problem is to make a telescoping box instead, which is made of two parts (an interior piece and a lid) instead of one.

How Do You Make Such a Large Box?

Even with this alternative design I had to make some adjustments. The book sets were large enough that they still didn’t quite fit on the boards. This meant I had to change how I transferred the design onto the board.

Who would’ve thought 30″x40″ was too small?

To make the majority of the box fit, I made all my measurements from the center line of the board edge. This method allows me to fit all the critical parts of the box on the board.

With all the important marks made I can now crease the board, make the necessary cuts, and assemble the interior piece of the box.

The lack of board is more apparent once the box is put together.

Luckily the solution is a simple one. All I need is a piece of scrap E-Flute (which we have plenty of) to fill the gap in the side wall.

Once that is complete, I made the lid of the box. I measured this piece the same way I did before in order to be as economical as possible with the board.

After that I just had to repeat the process for the second set of volumes.

Now these massive sets are ready to go! Too bad they’re still just as heavy though.

Circulating collections care, Circulating collections care, Conservation, Preservation, Uncategorized, What We Find In Books

When the Paper is too Nice

August 19, 2022 Jovana Ivezic 1 Comment

There’s something special about a book made with handmade paper. You don’t come across it too often in general collections, but, when you do, you want to take extra good care of it. This week a beautiful example of this arrived at the lab in the form of The Poems of Sappho, printed in 1910. As you can see in the images below, the book was in rather rough shape. I could tell it would be the perfect candidate for a new case. This means I would need to make new covers for this book.

Upon opening it, I immediately noticed the lovely deckled edges of the paper and what appeared to be a watermark.

A watermark is an image or design that is impressed into the paper during the papermaking process. This is easier to see when you hold the paper up to a light like so.

The main purpose of a watermark is to identify the papermaker; however, this watermark goes even further and tells us where the paper was made as well. In this case, the paper was handmade in Italy by a group called “The PM co”, which could possibly refer to The Paper Mills Company.

Saving this paper and the vital information on it is going to be my priority as I treat this book. This should be relatively straightforward, but what happens when two of these pages have been glued to the covers?

Preserving the Paper

When the book was bound, the pastedowns were made with the first and last sheet of the textblock of the book rather than using a separate decorative paper.

In order to make a new case for a book, I have to remove the old covers. I must lift the original handmade paper from the front and back boards to retain it. This can be done by taking an exceptionally thin metal spatula and running it back and forth under the paper to loosen and separate the paper from the covers.

This can be a tricky and time-consuming process if the paper is old and brittle, or if the paper is well adhered to the covers and doesn’t want to come off. Luckily, both pages cooperated with me and I managed to remove the covers without damaging the paper.

A lot of the original board material had to be lifted along with the paper, so the next step is to remove that material from the pages. Leaving it on would make it nearly impossible to neatly reattach the pastedowns when I made a new case for this book. So, I removed as much as I could mechanically before moving onto the rest of the treatment.

With the brand-new case complete, the book and it’s handmade paper are better protected and ready to be handled.

Circulating collections care, Conservation, Preservation, Uncategorized, What We Find In Books, What's In The Lab

Books Can be Deceiving

April 22, 2022 Jovana Ivezic

As someone who repairs books for a living, the idiom “don’t judge a book by its cover” can have a much more literal meaning than expected. I’m regularly encountering books that seem to need only one kind treatment from the outside, but then have more problems than I realized on the inside. This can be a bit frustrating when you’ve mentally prepared yourself for one kind of project and instead find yourself tackling more than you had planned for. Even so, it is especially satisfying to finish a treatment on a book that you felt was going to be complicated. In today’s blog, I’ll be sharing my most recent encounter with a book that I misjudged.

The Problem

The Perkins Library has a great number of collections of Arabic books like the ones you see below.

These books are especially striking due to the eye-catching uniformity of their spines. Outside of how aesthetically pleasing they are, there is an added benefit to the fact that all the books are identical in design. Take a look at this collection of books below. Do any of them look different than the rest?

If you happened to notice the fourth book from the left in particular, then you can see what I meant earlier by “an added benefit”. Thanks to the collections precise design, it’s all the more obvious when something isn’t quite right.

In this case, this poor book seems to have been crushed under something as well as torn along the spine. We certainly can’t leave the book to be handled by patrons in this state, so back to the lab it goes.

At this point, I had assumed the only problem I was dealing with was the crushed spine of the covers/textblock. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t realize that this book had been through more than just some extreme pressure. Right as you open the book to its title page, you’re greeted by discolored paper and some significant black speckling. The spotting continues a good 20 or so pages.

These are the tell-tale signs that not only did the book get wet at some point, but mold had made itself at home here as well.

Now, luckily this isn’t a terrible amount of mold to be dealing with. However, it does mean I have to add several more steps to my treatment before I can tackle the original issue of the crushed spine.

The Solution

Let’s say there hadn’t been any mold in this book. What would my treatment have looked like?

First, I would remove the covers so I could assess the damage done to the spine of the textblock. Once I had addressed that, I would prepare the textblock as I normally would for a recase. Finally, I would repair the covers by making a new spine piece to replace the damaged one, and reattached the textblock to the case.

Now, I will have to remove all of the mold first before I can start anything else.

Based on the dry and powdery consistency of the mold, I can tell that it is no longer active and can be safely cleaned by hand. To do so, I used a soot sponge to manually clean the mold and debris off of every page.

You can see the immediate difference before and after using the sponge on the old mold, both on the pages and the sponge itself.

The soot sponge is mostly likely also picking up dirt and dust on the pages as well, but regardless it’s clear the book needed a good cleaning.

Now that the textblock is free of the residual mold, I can finally get to the treatment I had planned at the start. This book will be back on the shelves and ready for patrons in no time!

Circulating collections care, Conservation, International materials, Preservation, What We Find In Books, What's In The Lab

North Korea as Seen Through Stamps

March 25, 2022 Jovana Ivezic

Stamp collecting, often associated with philately (or the study of stamps), is a hobby that has been around since the first postage stamp was issued by Britain in May of 1840. Since then, stamp collecting has been one of the world’s most popular hobbies, resulting in the production of over 400,000 different types of stamp by the year 2000.

Many of the stamps produced are from smaller countries seeking to bring in much needed revenue, which they achieve through the printing of limited run stamps specifically for stamp collectors. One such country happens to be North Korea. This fact came to my attention when a collection of North Korean stamp albums arrived at our lab.

The collection consists of five stapled pamphlets and two bound books, all full of loose stamps in need of securing.

I will mention that it is unclear whether these are actually functional stamps or just coated paper made to look like stamps. There is no noticeable adhesive on the backs of them, and even a UV light analysis and our ordering specialist couldn’t get us any closer to a conclusive answer.

Regardless, we couldn’t risk all of these stamps being lost or stolen. I had to find a way to contain them all so that patrons could access these albums without leaving the fate of these stamps to chance.

How do we treat these items?

Each of these albums is made up of pages containing several small slips of mylar with the bottom edge adhered to the actual page.

Within each of these slips sits either a single stamp or multiple stamps, which varies from page to page.

Although the stamps don’t necessarily fly about or out of the slips as you flip through the pages, it’s obvious that they aren’t exactly going to just stay in place over time.

So, what is the solution here?

Since these mylar slips were already at my disposal, it made the most sense to use them to my advantage. After applying a thin bead of wheat starch paste to the top of each stamp, I tipped each stamp into the mylar and made sure the bottom of the stamp was placed as far down into the slip as possible.

This way the stamp is secured in place without having to glue up the entire back of the item, and the mylar acts as a catch for the bottom of the stamp so that they can’t be pulled out as easily. With the stamps now safely secured, these albums are ready for a closer look at their contents.

How do we interpret these items?

These albums seem to be geared towards foreigners and tourists. Of the seven albums here, three contain text in Korean, Chinese, and English, one contains text in just Korean and English, and the other three contain text in just Korean and Chinese. Seeing as none of these are written only in Korean, it can be assumed that these albums were not intended solely for Korean audiences.

As you have also probably noticed, these stamps cover a wide variety of subjects as well. It seems as though you can find a stamp on just about anything if you really wanted to. This is probably for the benefit of appealing to as many collectors as possible who might only collect certain kinds of stamps.

The world of stamps is quite intriguing, especially considering how they can become vehicles for propaganda. Are you a stamp collector or a philatelist (someone who studies stamps)? Leave a comment with your thoughts on this collection if you are, and leave a comment even if you aren’t! We’d love to hear what you think about our new addition to the Perkins Library. If you’d like to find these items in our catalog, you can click any of these links.

Circulating collections care, Circulating collections care, Conservation, Preservation, Uncategorized, What We Find In Books, What's In The Lab

Stapled Instead of Sewn

February 25, 2022 Jovana Ivezic

When you look at how books are generally made, you’ll find that a majority of them are either sewn with thread, glued together as individual sheets, or occasionally bound with a combination of sewing and commercial glue.

On rarer occasions, a book will be stapled together. As luck would have it, one of these books recently came across my bench in need of a new cover. At first glance, you can’t immediately tell the difference between a stapled book and a sewn book.

It’s not until you open the book up and look at the gutter of one of the signatures that you might be able to see whether the book is stapled or not.

It’s even easier once you’ve taken the cover off and can look directly at the spine of the textblock. As you can see in the images below, there are staples running through a significant portion of the signatures of this book.

Now, in a perfect world where I have all the time and patience I could want, I might remove the staples, mend any damage to the signatures in the process, sew the book back together, and then make a new cover. In this case, such an approach would be too labor intensive and time consuming. As the only senior conservation technician charged with maintaining the general collections, I cannot devote that much time to one book when I might have as many as 25 other books also waiting to be treated.

Considerations

With binding structures like this, the treatment decisions tend to boil down to preserving the provenance of the object vs choosing to rebind the book for greater longevity. In this blog post by Peter D. Verheyen in 2011, it’s evident that these wire bindings are a curious part of the history of bookbinding. Since they’re unusual, and since our goal is to conserve as much of the original item as possible, one might think that saving the original binding would be the obvious choice.

But how do technicians in general collections conservation (such as myself) reconcile keeping as much of the original object intact when we also have to prioritize making sure that the book can withstand regular use from patrons? If the staples in the binding had been so rusted that they were breaking whenever I opened the book, I would most likely take a more involved approach to the treatment of this book. An example of such a treatment would be adhering a cotton cambric to the spine and sewing through it along with the textblock, which you can see an example of in this paper by our very own Beth Doyle.

Luckily, in this case, both the paper and the staples were in good enough condition that a secondary treatment wasn’t necessary. However, it could be argued that perhaps I should have gone ahead with the more complex treatment just in case the staples failed in the future. In the end, these are the dilemmas we face in general collections conservation.

Treatment

I decided that the best course of action would be to clean the spine of its original lining and glue and replace it with a strong Japanese tissue adhered with wheat starch paste. By doing so, the spine is stabilized and strengthened while the staples are also given additional support. This reduces the potential damage that could occur from future use and repeated opening and closing of the book.

With the textblock now in a stable state, I could prepare a new case for the book. The original case had already failed and since the original materials were too fragile to keep using, it didn’t make sense to try and reuse the case. Instead, I made an inset on the front board in order to preserve the original cover material. If you’d like to learn more about the book, you can find the catalog record here.

Digitizing, Preservation, What's In The Lab

Prepping Papyri

January 8, 2021 Henry Hebert

Quite a bit has been written on this blog over the years about caring for Duke’s sizable papyri collection, so many of our readers will be familiar. For those who may not know about it, the collection was digitally imaged back in the early 1990s and the images are publicly available for research. The Duke Papyrus Archive is a very helpful and well-used resource, but sometimes we get requests to reimage fragments from the collection. It may be that the resolution of the images in the archive is too low for a researcher’s needs, or there is a request to use multispectral imaging to see if additional information can be made legible.

P.Duk.inv 362: Lease of land, 2nd century B.C. Extracted from mummy cartonnage.

As we have mentioned before, each papyrus fragment is stored between two pieces of glass, which are taped around the edges. This housing solution allows the extremely fragile fragments to be safely and easily handled in the reading room, but it does pose some challenges for imaging. Our digital production staff are able to adjust the lighting environment to reduce reflections from the glass, but the glazing package also needs to be very clean both inside and out. Any dust, stray fibers, or residue are clearly visible in the high resolution images we produce. Prior to reimaging, each fragment is examined to determine if any cleaning or additional intervention is required.

Some of the taping on the glass packages is starting to show some wear and tear. White paper tape was used to seal the glazing for many of the fragments and the adhesive may have become desiccated and failed, or the paper carrier may be splitting. Sharp glass corners or edges may also be untaped and exposed.

Re-imaging is a good opportunity to remove the fragment from its glazing, clean the package, remount the fragment, and reseal the package with higher quality materials. The process is pretty straightforward. To begin, the tape is sliced open on all edges with a scalpel and the top piece of glass is carefully lifted away.

Next the papyrus fragment is removed by very gently sliding it off of the bottom glass sheet onto a piece of clean Bristol board. The surface of the board is very smooth, so papyrus fibers along the edge of the fragments do not catch. The fragment may actually be composed of several loose pieces, so I always do a few little test lifts at the edges of the piece with a microspatula first to get a sense of the fragment’s condition. Luckily, this fragment is all in one piece. I like to note the orientation of the fragment in pencil at the corner of the board, just as a reminder when I go to reassemble the package. The fragment is placed in a temporary enclosure for safety and set aside.

The adhesive of the paper tape is water-soluble and comes off of the glass pretty easily. After mechanically scraping off the tape carrier with a scalpel blade, the glass is placed in small plastic tray filled with filtered water so that any remaining residue will soften and can be scrubbed off. I finish cleaning the glass with a 1:1 ethanol and deionized water solution and buff the surface with a cotton pad. To keep it as clean as possible it’s important to clean any working surfaces beforehand and wear gloves.

With the glass clean and dry, it’s time to transfer the papyrus fragment back. The papyrus fragment is aligned on the lower glass and secured to it using very small pieces of pre-made remoistenable repair tissue (see Baker 2010 for instructions on making the remoistenable paper). When the mounting strips are dry, the upper sheet of glass is placed on top and the edges are taped with Filmoplast SH linen tape. I like to double-up the taping at the corners of the package to ensure that every edge is completely covered.

In the years before the Rubenstein Library renovation, these glass packages were rehoused in uniform rigid portfolios with cut foam padding. Each portfolio has a picture label and small groups of them are stored together in metal edge boxes for easy retrieval. You can see images and read about that rehousing project here. These portfolios are still functioning very well, so the cleaned and retaped glazing package is placed back in it’s custom portfolio and box before being transferred to the digital production center.