“Cat In The Hat & Much More” by Angela and Emily Bryant. Winner of the 2013 Best In Show Award.
Start cooking the books! The 9th Annual Edible Book Festival will take place on April 1st from 2-3:30pm in Perkins Library room 217. Note the room change this year.
As in years past we will have a silent auction of the entries. Competitive bidding is highly encouraged. Proceeds will support the Duke University Libraries Helene Baumann Fund.
Attendees will be asked to electronically vote for your favorite entries in the following categories:
Most Edible
Least Edible
Best book structure (looks or acts most like a real book)
Best student entry (k-12, college and grad students)
Punniest
Best In Show
The auction and voting will take place between 2-3pm, with winners announced shortly thereafter. Please bring your entries to Perkins 217 at 1:30pm. We need time to enter them into the electronic voting database.
For past years’ entries, visit Flickr and search “Edible Book Festival” or click on the Edible Book Festival website for direct links. Light refreshments will also be served.
Our loyal followers will know that we contribute content to the Duke University Libraries Instagram page. Instagram allows us to post visual content quickly and is fun to use. It also reaches a different audience than our other social media sites.
Recently I’ve started using Instagram’s new video function to experiment with creating training videos. The app allows videos up to 15 seconds in length. It is a challenge to get your information across clearly and succinctly in such a short period, but not impossible. Mission accepted!
Using Instagram to record short training videos.
With the help of Amy at The Devil’s Tale, we created a short instructional on how to properly remove books from the shelf without harming the head caps or tearing a fragile spine. You can access that video here: http://instagram.com/p/juFiE6gw3q/
As a first attempt I think it works. The audio is a little faint, but then again we were in the middle of the stacks so I didn’t want to talk very loudly. I have some other topics to try. If it works, we may be able to move some of our care and handling training to an online version, which would catch more student assistants and new employees, especially those that work the late and weekend shifts.
If you are on Instagram, you can follow “dukelibraries” to see our posts. If you don’t use the app, you can find our posts on the Instagram website. There are a lot of libraries on Instagram, I encourage you to find and follow them. Are you using Instagram for your department? Let us know in the comments.
I am always on the hunt for useful tools. The other day I had a large number of books and I needed to record the bar codes and transfer them into an excel file. I don’t have a laptop at work, but I do have an iPad. I searched the app store and found “Bar-Code.” It looked like it would do what I needed so I downloaded it. Within a couple of minutes my project was underway.
First, I scanned each bar code with the iPad camera:
Each bar code is scanned as an image and is transcribed on the right-hand column.
When you are done, you have the choice of what to do with the data. I chose to email the list to myself so I could put it easily into an Excel file.
Using this app beat writing down all the bar code numbers and retyping them into a spreadsheet when I got back to my office. It saved a lot of time. The free version, which I used, does not save the data once you email it. I believe the paid version of this particular app will allow you to save your data.
I think this app, or a similar one, could be very useful during a disaster situation when you needed to track items going offsite for freezing. You could scan each item going into a crate, then send each crate’s inventory to yourself as an email. I think I would make each crate a separate email in case the network or app crashed unexpectedly. I would hate to record hundreds of bar codes then have the network crash or an email not go through for some reason.
What apps have you found useful in your preservation or conservation duties and how have you used them? Please share ideas in the comments section.
This month on the 1091 Project we are talking trash…and dust bunnies and overflowing scrap bins and dirty sinks.
Conservation work requires a clean space. If you have a lot of dust and lint floating around it can get into your paste and under your repair tissue; overflowing scrap bins can make it hard to find a good piece of board to use for a project; and dirty sinks and lab ware just makes everyone crazy. Keeping the lab clean is necessary, even more so when you are adjacent to a construction zone and have a lot of fans and air scrubbers running.
Every day, Leon from Housekeeping comes and picks up the trash and does routine cleaning for us and we are grateful for his help. Even with this daily maintenance the dust bunnies can multiply under taborets and in corners. Last month at our staff meeting we decided to implement a quarterly Lab Cleaning Day. To keep the labor equitable and to not stick the same person with the worst job every quarter, we divided the lab into six zones each with a checklist to complete. Each zone is assigned to one person, and that assignment will rotate each quarter.
The zones include:
Dirty room and encapsulation area
Main sink area including the long counter top and drying rack
Board shears, floor presses, and vertical board storage areas
Store room, photo doc room and vault
Locker area and two computer stations
Copier and CoLibri area, shared benches and the flat files with oversized supplies
The sink area before and after.
In your zone you are responsible for thoroughly cleaning under things, in things, and around things. If you need to get on your hands and knees to do it (e.g. the dorm sized fridge where we keep our paste) or put in an hour of elbow grease (I’m looking at you, Mr. Sink), then get in there and “get it done.”
In addition to an assigned zone each person is responsible for tidying up their bench, taboret and side table areas. It’s a good time to go through your taboret and get rid of scraps and bits of things, tidy up your press boards, scrub your bench top and generally organize things around you.
Lab Cleaning Day does take time away from repairing materials. However, having a clean lab allows you to find supplies and tools easier and reduces stray fibers and dirt in your past. A clutter-free lab also makes you feel better about coming to work.
Let’s head over to Parks Library Preservation and see their solutions for keeping their lab space clean and tidy.
Look at the shine on the sink! I should have taken a before picture. Trust me, it was black with PVA and paste, ick!
This kozo paper has gold leaf and ferns imbedded in the delicate fibers.
We received a 12-volume set of books on the history of Washi. Each page has a description of the paper and includes a large (approx. 8″x10″) swatch. They are bound in a traditional side-sewn binding with each volume in a separate slip case. The set is amazing and beautiful.
Would it be wrong to keep them?
Minowashi is a decorative paper with ferns and leaves in it. This version also has pressed butterflies. The butterfly bodies appear to be printed, but the wings are real.
The Duke and Sons tobacco album (see earlier post) had interesting structural features that presented challenges for a successful treatment. When the cash book was made into a scrapbook, the owner glued facing pages together to form stiff leaves. The two-ply pages held up well to all of the heavy attachments, but the structure made resewing the text difficult since I couldn’t get access to the center folio. The addition of all of the tobacco cards to the binding swelled the textblock to twice the size of the spine and blew out the sewing.
It’s not every day that we get an item like this in the lab and I wanted to do it justice with a repair that retained its features as a ledger book while allowing it to safely function as a scrapbook. You can see additional images of this treatment on Flickr.
I’ve just finished the most challenging and enjoyable treatment of the year for me: a ledger book from the 1880’s that was later repurposed as a scrapbook for a Duke Tobacco card collection. The collectors cards were included in packs of Duke Tobacco and most of this collection appears to date to the late 19th Century. The cards were issued in various topical series: international costumes, historical figures, great ships, flags, and writers, among others. They range in physical format, from chromolithographs, to tiny booklets and even albumen photographic prints.
The most interesting thing to me about the cards are the different portrayals of women. There are cartoonish representations of women fishing, colorful illustrations of women bicycling and exercising, and of course some early pin-up type photographs of actresses and performers of the era. Look for this album and other Duke and Sons Tobacco materials in an upcoming Duke University Libraries Digital Collection. Here are some of my favorite pages.
Happy New Year from the 1091 Project. This month we are looking at the year ahead and discussing what is looming on our horizons. Maybe we will make a resolution or two for good measure.
As many of you know the library is undergoing a renovation that is slated to be finished in 2015. Conservation is literally on the other side of the construction site’s wall. So far we have endured one major leak due to a severed water pipe and one minor leak due to a clogged drain. Right now we are listening to the dulcet tones of the hoe ram as it breaks up bedrock. My wish for this new year is that we get through the next 18 months with no more major incidents.
As part of the 2015 grand opening celebration we will be helping to install a major exhibit for the Rubenstein Library. Decisions are already being made about the materials that will go into the exhibit. We will be pulling these items soon to start the evaluation and treatment process. The exhibit spaces in the library will also be expanding as part of the renovation. As a result, we will see an increased demand in exhibit preparation services and we will need to make sure resources are in place to accommodate this workflow.
Pincers from the HOM instruments collection.
We have a couple of large boxing projects on the horizon. Similar to the re-boxing of the papyri, these will be long-term projects that we will do over the course of multiple Boxing Days. One such project is the continued boxing of items from the History of Medicine’s instruments and artifact collection. These are always fun to work with, if not a bit frightening.
We have a couple of in-house training sessions planned that focus on deacidification and washing techniques that staff have learned either through attending workshops or through their research. These techniques give us the opportunity to work on materials that we may not have treated in the past due to the lack of a sound treatment protocol.
The other rapidly expanding workflow on our horizon is digital project preparation. Erin is in charge of coordinating this workflow with the Digital Production Center and the library’s new Digital Projects Coordinator. We need to determine our capacity for evaluating and treating materials slated for digitization, and strategize ways to respond to an increase in this workflow as that program expands.
We have one very exciting top-secret project we are working on that I am not at liberty to make public quite yet. Stay tuned for an announcement later in the spring. Let’s see what 2014 holds for Parks Library Preservation.
Is it wrong to covet these really big fans that the construction company owns?
The lesson we have learned this time is that a metal ladder is not safe around standing water and electricity. We’ll be purchasing a Fiberglas ladder this week to replace the old unsafe ladder.
Conservation is a very visual endeavor. We match colors of fabric for book covers, we blend acrylics to tone repair tissues and we take images of our work both before and after repair. But have you ever wondered what our work sounds like?
Here are Soundcloud clips from the lab. Which is your favorite?
