It’s annual statistics time! As you can imagine Covid-19 influenced our stats for this year. I don’t think any of us anticipated we would spend the first few months of the fiscal year working exclusively from home, and when we did return it was on a staggered schedule to avoid too many people in the … Continue reading FY2021: By The Numbers
We’ve written before about book publishers’ novel and sometimes misguided attempts at including additional media in bindings (see Robots 1:1). Many new acquisitions to the circulating collection include supplementary images, audio, or video on CD, and they often come to Conservation Services for a pocket that can be physically attached to the book to keep … Continue reading Media in Books, Revisited
By Mary Yordy, Senior Conservation Technician The ghostly, rhythmic creased pattern in the leather covering this volume caught my eye when the set came through the lab for boxing. I wondered how it was done and if the technique had a name. I consulted with coworkers, but no one had seen anything quite like it. … Continue reading A Mysterious Leather Technique
Duke Libraries is not paid to advertise Onset products, we just really like them. We all know how important a stable environment is for the long-term preservation of our collections. An environmental monitoring program is essential for collecting both short-term and long-trend data in critical areas of the library. For many years now we have … Continue reading Peering Into the Unknown
It’s annual statistics time! As you can imagine Covid-19 struck a blow to our productivity in terms of conservation work. We have all been busy working from home improving documentation, learning new skills through online resources like the ICON Together At Home Webinar Series, and the Guild of Bookworkers generous online offerings during the spring, … Continue reading FY2020: By the Numbers
By Rachel Penniman, Conservation Specialist About 10 years ago I visited Claire Van Vliet at her Janus Press studio space in Newark, Vermont with another conservation intern. Claire was incredibly kind, spending all afternoon showing us around and talking about her work. At the end of the visit she gave us each a copy of … Continue reading Woven and Interlocking Books
Each spring for the last couple of years, I’ve traveled up to the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library to teach a workshop on blind and gold tooling to students in the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC). The workshop provides a very basic introduction to all the tools and materials that have historically … Continue reading Zoom Tip: Add a Handheld Camera
It’s that time of year when we report our annual statistics to our administration. We thought we would share these with you, too. 839 Book Repairs (down 23% from last year) 1,439 Pamphlets (up 35%) 12 Treatments: Other (not reported last year) 2,434 Flat Paper (up 75%) 6,822 Protective Enclosures (up 14%) 13,966 Disaster recovery … Continue reading FY 2019: By the Numbers
Today is the last day for Garrette Lewis-Thomas, our second HBCU Library Alliance/University of Delaware Winterthur intern. The end of this two month internship really snuck up on us! As you may have read in some of Beth’s recent posts, we have thrown a ton of information and instruction at Garrette in the last eight … Continue reading Farewell Garrette!
Last April we got our new freezer delivered. The first thing we did with it was to set up a table-top disaster situation* so our intern and new staff member could gain experience working with damp and wet books. That was back in July 2018. The books have been in the freezer since. This … Continue reading The Iceman Floweth
