Conservation, Exhibits

10 Years, 10 Treatments

Yesterday we installed our exhibit “Ten Years, Ten Treatments.” As part of our year-long celebration of our tenth anniversary, we wanted to highlight some of our favorite work.

The exhibit is outside the Biddle Reading Room on the first floor of Perkins. While there, you can also see our display in the wall cases (on the opposite wall from the exhibit) that gives ten tips you can use to save your personal collections.
Our exhibit will be up through mid-October. We are planning a companion exhibit of Ten Projects from the Digital Production Center to be installed in our exhibit space on the Lower Level of Perkins outside the Conservation Lab. Hopefully we will have that up next week, we’ll let you know when that happens.
Conservation, Digital Production Center, Manuscript Day

Here’s Your Mule

It’s Manuscript Day in the lab, similar to Boxing Day, wherein we all work on flat paper repair. Today we are continuing the Broadside Project, getting these items ready for their close up in the Digital Production Center. North Carolina is this month’s project, and this little gem caught my eye. It’s from the New Bern (NC) Republican Banner, dated April 1884.

Mary has been repairing the tears and losses on this broadside with Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste. After the tissue is applied, a blotter is placed on top with a weight until dry. When the digitization is complete, these will come back to Conservation for rehousing.

Collaboration, Conservation, Digital Production Center

Ethiopic Manuscript Digitization Project

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As you may know we have been working with the Digital Production Center to digitize the scrolls in the Ethiopic Manuscript collection. I’ve posted some images from that project, not the high-resolution ones the DPC is creating, but some snaps I made during the imaging of items that I found particularly interesting. You can find them in our Flickr Ethiopic Manuscript Project album.

The date ranges are fairly recent but you can see traditional vellum joins and repairs in the scrolls. I always find it interesting how people utilized defects in the skins to their advantage. I also find the graphic depictions to be wonderfully modern and very geographic, and the colors are amazing. You never know what you will find when you start digging through collections. One wooden icon (not the one shown here) has been previously repaired with dental floss. File that under “use what you have on hand.”
Announcements, Digital Production Center

Ten Years, Ten People: Rita Johnston, Digitization Assistant for Road 2.0 Project

Rita Johnston, Digitization Assistant for ROAD 2.0 project has been with the department for one year. She is digitizing outdoor advertising materials described in the Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions database. The bulk of materials being digitized for this project are from the OAAA Archives and OAAA Slide Library collections, but some images from the John Paver Papers and the John E. Brennan Survey Reports are also included.

The project includes about 15,000 photographs and negatives which Rita has digitized, and I have about 12,000 slides which she has sent to a vendor for digitization. She uses different equipment including flatbed scanners and the Zeutschel 14000 A2 scanner for photographs and the Phase One Camera for transparent materials such as negatives. Rita is wrapping up the digitization phase of the project and will begin focusing her attention on normalization and cleanup of the metadata in the ROAD database.

When asked what is the most interesting collection you have worked with, Rita replied:

Since I have mostly been working with materials from the OAAA Archives, the OAAA Archives is the most interesting collection I have worked with. There is a great deal of variety in the content and types of materials in the collection. Much of the subject matter is of billboards, art designs, and other forms of outdoor advertising from the 1910s to the early 1980s.

The subject matter includes food & beverages, local businesses, political propaganda, cars, financial institutions, movies, and of course, beer and cigarettes. It’s really interesting to see how much billboards have changed over time, from the beautiful hand painted signs of the early to mid 20th century to machine printed billboards of later years.

There are even a few interesting examples in the collection of cellulose acetate negatives breaking down. All negatives are prone to deterioration over time, and the process may be sped up if negatives are exposed to high heat and humidity. Some of the negatives smell strongly of vinegar and are warped and cracked where the emulsion is breaking down.

We are all eagerly awaiting Rita’s project to be online. Thanks Rita for all of your hard work!

Announcements, Digital Production Center

Ten Years, Ten People: Mike Adamo, Digital Production Developer

Mike Adamo, Digital Production Developer, arrived at Duke just over five years ago. Mike graduated with a degree in Photography in 1993 after which he opened and operated a table-top advertising studio for three years in Atlanta Georgia. After that Mike worked in a stock photography studio as a black and white printer for four years. The studio switched from analog to digital photography while he was there so Mike learned about color calibration and color profiles, which was relatively new at the time. He came to Duke after working for four years as a supervisor of a digital imaging unit at a library automation software company in Virginia.

As a Digital Production Developer Mike assess Library collections for digitization, creates images for high end print projects, and designs workflows for digitization projects in the Digital Production Center. He is also responsible for calibrating and maintaining the various cameras and scanners that they use in their daily operations.

When asked about his favorite preservation project, Mike responded:

My favorite project over the years has been building the Digital Production Center. When I started on March 14, 2005, the Digital Production Center was located on Perkins lower level behind the copy room and was often used as a shortcut from the lower level to the RBMSCL. We had one Epson Expression 10000 and a BetterLight scanback fresh out of the box. The camera room had previously been a traditional wet darkroom. The sinks had been removed but some of the plumbing remained jutting out of the walls and though the tiles had been scrubbed clean the chemical stains from years past were still present.
The questions at the time were: What is a digital collection? How do we represent the physical item digitally? What metadata scheme should we use and how do we capture it? While from a distance these questions seem fairly simple and straight forward once we started building digital collections we had to apply the concepts of sustainability and scalability while being as transparent as possible. Easy… right?

Since then, we have moved 3 times and are now in our permanent space (I think). This space was specifically designed with the Digital Production Center in mind. Our air handler is HEPA filtered, the lighting is full spectrum, the monitors are color calibrated, the walls are 18% gray, the floor is cork and we have a large vault that we share with Conservation.

We added another flatbed scanner, a dedicated quality control station, a P65 Phase One R-Cam, a Zeutschel 14000 A2, a SAMMA Solo video encoder a high-end light table (for digitizing negatives on the Phase One), 2 FTE, additional students and a database to track production and collect technical metadata. In addition to all of this a few months ago we added a Scribe book scanner through the Internet Archive. Our production rates have gone from 4000 + digital images the first year to a projected 100,000 digital images this year and that doesn’t include the images created using the Scribe.

We have come a long way in a short time.

You can see some of the work that Mike and the DPC staff on the Digital Collections Blog.

Announcements

TRLN Bookbinders: Islamic Binding

The interesting thing about Islamic bindings is that they haven’t changed much. According to Jane Greenfield in “ABC of Bookbinding,” the format was likely learned from binders in Ethiopia. This structure strongly influenced bookbinding in Europe, traveling through Italy and Spain.

Extant bindings are generally made of highly burnished paper text blocks with a simple chain stitch. The covers were made off the book and included a fore edge flap. The case itself was adhered in a tight-back fashion (the spine of the case is glued to the spine of the text block). The endbands are an interesting combination of sewn and woven techniques as described in “Headbands and How to Work Them” by Jane Greenfield and Jenny Hille. The leather-covered boards and flap were decorated, but not the spine. More information can be found on the National Library of Medicine’s Islamic Medical Manuscripts web site.
Our models strayed a little from the extant bindings we looked at from our collections. Mostly due to our desire to keep personal costs down, we used Western paper and book cloth to create our samples. They follow the original structure, and we now understand the bindings a little better than we did before. You can see Jamie’s wonderful models on his Flickr page. Henry’s model is at the top of this post, can see more on Henry’s web site.
What struck me is how influential these bindings were on the progression of binding through Europe. The chain stitching, sewn headbands, the case construction…these were lost and seemingly rediscovered sometime later in the 19th Century A.C.E. What happened? how did this structure migrate through Europe, get lost, and come back without being cited as a major influence in the histories of book binding? We need a better understanding of non-European bookbinding history. Anyone have some good resources for that? they seem to be missing from the canon.
Announcements

TRLN Bookbinders

The Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) Bookbinders is a group of staff members from the conservation labs of UNC, NC State and Duke University libraries that meet monthly to study historic book bindings and recreate them by making binding models. Membership to the group is by invitation only as our space is limited.

We have been meeting for a little over a year, and I’m far behind on reporting on our projects. I’ll be uploading several posts over the next few weeks for your reading enjoyment.

Our first project was to investigate Ethiopic bindings. We have several extant bindings in our Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library so we had a lot to look at.

Dating from the 4th Century C.E. the Ethiopic Binding, also sometimes called Coptic Binding, is the first multi-section binding known to exist. It was commonly used until the Middle Ages, but similar bindings are found through the 19th Century C.E. The text blocks were made of papyrus or parchment, however our models are paper. The boards are sewn directly onto the text block. These books were commonly covered with leather and carried in a leather case called a Mahdar. Many of our models were left uncovered so you can see the sewing structures. An in-depth discussion of the history of these bindings can be found in J.A. Szirmai’s “Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding.”

The single book on left is by Jamie Bradway. Finished models by class participants.

More images from our sessions can be found on Flickr.

Duke University Libraries Preservation