Category Archives: Uncategorized

Quick Pic: Freezer Friday

Freezer Friday: repair edition.

When we noticed there was condensation around our freezer’s door, we called our awesome repair tech, Jeff McLean. Little did we know this would be a multi-day effort that involved removing the door and the heating mechanism around it, which are both under a bunch of foam insulation. It may look bad now, but Jeff will have this up and running today.

What’s in your preservation freezer?

Woolf’s New Home

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.

Virginia Woolf writing desk positioned in the library exhibit suite

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.

Woolf desk positioned in the reading room windowThis 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.

plastic hooks with suction cups for attaching to 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.

Environmental monitors attached to glass with suction cup hooks

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.

Welcome to Our New Intern Angela Nettles

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. 

Stamps in Your Library Passport

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!

A Tiny Press Calls for a Tiny Book

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.

When the Paper is too Nice

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.

Makers and Fixers All Over Campus

Staff from the Conservation Lab were featured in a very nice piece on Duke Today about the various repair shops around campus: https://today.duke.edu/2022/08/fixers-anything-duke

It’s a really wonderful peek into some of the extremely specialized work that goes into supporting buildings, collections, and services at Duke. Some of the facilities maintenance is more visible in the summer, when classes are out and campus is a little less crowded- but it is nice to read about the different types of skilled labor that are happening behind the scenes. We appreciate the opportunity to share!

Preservation Week 2022 Is Here!

There is so much great programming this week as we celebrate Preservation Week 2022. We are rounding up some of the notices we have seen, if you have an event you would like to share, please add it in the comments.

ALA Preservation Week has two scheduled webinars this week that are free to attend:
  • “How to Implement Sustainability in your Facility” on April 26th at 1-2pm Central Time. “In a time when sustainability and saving energy is imperative to slowing down climate change, institutions and organizations must become more aggressive when it comes to saving energy. There are a number of sustainable energy saving strategies that collecting institutions can implement, however, these strategies require knowledge of the facility that houses the collection as well as a strong data monitoring program. “
  • “Digital Preservation’s Impact on the Environment” on April 28th at 1-2pm Central Time. “Digital content is created and collected by everyone, not just libraries and archives. Keeping digital content viable requires not only energy use, but also refreshing the digital storage media and technologies. This webinar will explore the energy consumption and e-waste generated in current preservation infrastructures and actions, and review the environmental impact embodied in the full lifecycle of these infrastructures. It will include recommendations for actions and policies to mitigate digital preservation’s impact on the environment.”
  • Follow ALA Preservation Week on Instagram and tag your posts  #PreservationWeek22
  • Check out ALA’s Preservation Week resource page. 
The Library of Congress has an awesome lineup of free webinars this week.
  • Fragments, Discovery and Creating Knowledge Using state-of-the-art, non-invasive examination techniques, Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD) staff are collaborating with other library staff to learn more from the material/physical aspects of the Library’s collections. PRTD has been taking non-invasive portable instruments to special collection reading rooms to work with curators and to add value to our collections by answering curatorial and researcher questions. Working with Marianna Stell in Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) we have been exploring 12th to 16th century parchment “fragments” to expand our understanding of historic parchment and inks. Additionally, we are also looking at contemporary paper and inks as we work to better understand “at-risk” components of modern collections.
    Monday April 25, 11am. Speaker: Dr. Fenella France, Chief, Preservation Research and Testing Division
    Register Here!
  • Preserving the Legacy of Robert Cornelius and Other Daguerreotypes in the Prints & Photographs Division Daguerreotypes are amongst the earliest photographic records and the Library holds over 800 of these images, including the iconic daguerreotype self-portrait of Robert Cornelius made in October or November of 1839. Ms. Wetzel will provide a brief history of the development of the daguerreotype, an introduction to the work of Robert Cornelius, and explain how her research project on this subject has led to a recent acquisition and generated the current focused effort to preserve the daguerreotypes at the Library.
    Tuesday April 26, 11am. Speaker: Rachel Wetzel, Senior Photograph Conservator
    Register Here!
  • Preservation Digitization Program OverviewThe Preservation Services Division performs a wide variety of reformatting including brittle books, foreign newspaper digitization, as well as tangible media capture and forensics. This presentation will include a brief discussion of each reformatting, plus a sample of online collections.
    Wednesday April 27, 11am. Speaker: Aaron Chaletzky, Head, Reformatting Projects Section
    Register Here!
  • Moving Collections to an Off-Site Facility: Key Things to Keep In Mind This presentation will provide a top level overview of the issues to keep in mind if a library decides to move a portion of their collections to an offsite facility. Key topics include selection of materials for transfer, identification of the offsite facility, shelving schemas, transportation of materials, retrievals and governance policies.
    Thursday April 28, 11am. Speaker: Cathy Martyniak, Chief, Collection Management Division
    Register Here!
  • Fiscal and Organizational Sustainability for Preservation Programs Hear how the Library of Congress Preservation Directorate plans for and maintains its preservation programs. These include a series of reorganizations, completed in 2017 and 2021, and an ongoing series of cost studies. These studies examine total costs of major service areas and support scenario planning around pay and non-pay activities. These combined efforts help to make sure the Preservation Directorate will be able to respond to changes: in immediate requirements and across strategic planning cycles, while making progress on long-term and large-scale preservation needs.
    Friday April 29, 11am. Speaker: Jacob Nadal, Director for Preservation
    Register Here!
Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts
  • “You Don’t Have to be Special to Use Special Collections” is on April 26th at 2pm Eastern Daylight Time.  What can archives and special collections offer an “unaffiliated” and curious public? Join us for a webinar with Independent Historian and Writer Lucie Levine, for a discussion on how any interested person might make use of collections.
Newburyport Public Library 
  • The Library put together two online videos discussing preserving personal collections. These are “Archival Supplies and Storage” and “Archival Storage and Handling Tips.”
Yale University Libraries Preservation Department
  • Need a LibGuide for Preservation Week. Here it is. The “Stressed about pests” looks really good.
Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission (RIHPHC) and the Rhode Island Advisory Commission on Historical Cemeteries
  • RI Historical Cemeteries Awareness and Preservation Weeks programming is free but filling fast. Learn about historic cemeteries or volunteer for a cleanup. There are plenty events to sign up for, check out their calendar.

Books Can be Deceiving

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!

Stapled Instead of Sewn

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.

An opened book revealing the gutter of the pages where a staple can be seen.

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.

A picture of the stapled textblock post spine cleaning being held in a hand. The spine and staples are protected with a thin Japanese tissue, so you can still see the staples.

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.