Library Preservation 2

Ash Wednesday in the Stacks

2012-02-22T07:35:00.000-06:00

This morning I went to the stacks and held a brief religious service. (St. Francis preached to the birds and the beasts, so I can preach to the books.) I addressed my congregation of volumes – sitting still and attentive – with the only words appropriate for this morning.

“You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

I’ve written more than a time or two about my take on impermanence and mortality, so I’ll spare you that spiel, except to say that these things we preserve, and we who do the preserving last but a brief moment – and all is well.

A Conservator Ponders Impermanence (on Preservation & Conservation Administration News)

Two Conservators Ponder Impermanence

Death Denial and Preservation

Collecting and Immortality

Portraits in Preservation - John Townsend

2012-02-14T17:05:00.000-06:00

Bio: John Townsend now operates a small hand-bookbinding and conservation workshop in Sharon Springs, NY, known as “Anonymous Bookbinder.” He has been a bookbinder for over 35 years, but a librarian, a conservator and an administrator for nearly as long. He began his professional career as head of the Conservation Lab at the New York Public Library immediately after graduating in the first class of Columbia University's Library Conservation and Preservation Program. He has also served as head of the NY State Conservation/Preservation Program, and as a preservation planning and evaluation consultant for SOLINET, the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), the National Library of Indonesia, the World Bank Global Environmental Facility, and for many other organizations and institutions. Immediately before starting Anonymous Bookbinder, he ended his administrative career working in information technology, digital information access and related fields as executive director of the New York State Higher Education Initiative.

1. Describe an experience that was particularly influential in your professional development.

Past experiences are sometimes more colored by present attitudes than we admit, but one very early one does stand out. I've referred to it so often that it must have something to do with why I turned out the way I did (professionally speaking). Before I was a binder or knew in any certain way what one was, I tried to repair a favorite book, much used and battered. This was somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea aboard a U.S. Navy tanker and my repair materials were limited to masking and scotch tape, manilla card cut from folders, and clear self-adhesive contact paper. I made a very neat and tidy job of it—everything cut square, evenly applied and trimmed—but discovered afterward that it would not open, at least not in a way that anyone intent on reading it would expect.

Back in the US and in port, I went to the Norfolk Public Library to see what I could find out about what was wrong. I left with books by Cockerell, Diehl and (I think) Corderoy. (I also found a ten dollar bill on the floor by the check out and turned it in to the librarian, who later sent it to me since it remained unclaimed. The first money I made from binding.) I knew nothing, but these books were an “open sesame,” if not an actual revelation. What I realized, immediately and intuitively, was that books are articulated mechanical structures with a logical relationship between materials, components and functional parameters. It is a built object that can perform certain functions if well designed and constructed, or fail if not. Of course, the words to describe what I understood only came later.

This preoccupation with structure (“without one mention of decoration”, as Gary Frost would later say) set me on the path to becoming a binder and, eventually, a conservator. I think it also helped establish a habit of looking into the inner workings of things—the relationships among parts, whether physical, social, institutional or personal—that played a big part in my administrative career, as a preservation consultant, certainly, but even in my time working with more recently evolved information technologies.

2. How do you think working in preservation has shaped or changed your worldview?

We all work on the basis of cultural assumptions about who we are, what we do, and how we do it. Even if these assumptions are unknown and unexamined they are there, underpinning the way we think and act—our worldview. On my first trip to Indonesia as a preservation consultant I was still a young, evangelical preservation librarian—that is to say, I was inspired by an untested, irrational and ultimately unworkable certainty that we not only knew what we were doing but had the final answers to all the burning questions of conservation and preservation within our reach, if not already firmly in hand. When I left all of these convictions and many of my cultural assumptions had been challenged and some had been destroyed or abandoned utterly.

Put simply, it was a different place and different cultural assumptions prevailed—the rug had been pulled from under me. I could have ignored this (as I have witnessed many consultants do) and, when confronted with “familiar” issues and problems, I could easily have provided what were for us (i.e., those sharing my cultural assumptions) standard advice, protocols, and solutions. But they would have been useless. To be of any use at all, my work had to at least be aware of these differences and I had to work with my patient Indonesian counterparts to translate what I knew or thought I knew into a new place, new conditions, and new assumptions. I began to ask myself over and over, why do we do what we do, and why do we do it the way that we do it? This has become a mantra of sorts in all my work. I believe these are metaphysical questions, that is to say, they are fundamental, practical questions about how we relate to our work, our selves, and our fellows. This has likely prevented, to some degree, the cultural arrogance of my early evangelical preservation self from overwhelming the rest of my work and my “worldview.” Not that I am now devoid of cultural arrogance or that I have anything that can be codified as a worldview . . . But I know for certain that I don't know it all, which I once thought I did, or acted as if I thought I did.

3. What part of your preservation work most excites and engages you? Give specific examples.

Problem solving; digging down to the root of an issue and devising an accommodation that doesn't further complicate things. These days that mostly means treatment problems at the bench but I think it is equally true of my earlier consulting and administrative work. Learning how to make something well is solving a problem, building a workable relationship between materials, components and functional requirements, whether its a book, a house, a photovoltaic power system or a garden (to name my other obsessions). Or sorting out the unholy mess of multiple previous “repairs” to make a volume functional again. Or modifying a “standard” board reattachment to better suit the quirks of the item in hand. The same can be true of research—piecing together a puzzle by the slow accretion of bits of information, as when digging through past binding practices to see if they don't still have something useful to say. Administrative work can also be seen as problem solving, but there are often so many institutional pathologies between you and the real issue at hand that it can be difficult to stay focused, let along move forward. Still, it can be interesting. For a while.

4. If you were teaching what you do to a student, what would you say is the most important thing to learn in order to do your job well?

“Most people do not take heed of the things they encounter, nor do they grasp them even when they have learned about them, although they suppose they do.” Heraclitus fragment 57 (6^th century BC).

5. Bonus question (optional) - What do you preserve and why?

I don't think I believe that preservation can in any way be considered a “higher calling,” even if it in some measure contributes to the common good. It is simply something that I can do as a result of some combination of nature and nurture. I became interested in binding and preservation because I was interested in the content of books. There was stuff there I didn't know; I wanted to know it and at some point the books would need some physical help to keep that stuff accessible.

Access to information is what book and library preservation are about. It is also what information technologies are about. Not that we know all about physical preservation yet, but there are perhaps still more questions than answers on the IT side of the equation. Again, these are fundamental and practical questions, which is to say that they are metaphysical questions. Much of the difficulty of trying to answer them seems to be that we have so far tended to confuse the tool with the goal. Perhaps this is why one friend referred to my time working in IT as “John's time on the dark side.” Yet both sides are concerned with the same things. To borrow from Elizabeth Eisenstein on the printing press, they are both about dissemination, standardization, organization, data collection and preservation of information. We just have to figure out what works.

Portraits in Preservation - A Call for Students

2012-01-28T12:28:00.000-06:00

I've received some positive feedback to the two Portraits in Preservation I've posted, and have a handful more people out there working on crafting their responses to my questions.

It has always been my intention with this project to include not only seasoned veterans, but also hear from people who are currently training, or recently trained, to enter the preservation profession. And, as I am looking for some way for this blog to recognize the American Library Association's Preservation Week, April 22-28, I've decided to attempt to post a Student Portrait in Preservation each day during Preservation Week.

I've already got ideas for some individuals to invite, but I need more, so if you are a student, a recent graduate, or just feel like a novice in the preservation world, or if you know one, I would love to hear from you. I would cast this net wide - hearing from those in those in traditional book conservation to those looking for a career in digital preservation.

You can contact me by commenting on this post, or direct message me on twitter @kevindriedger or email me at ksdriedger [at] yahoo [dot] com

Replacing full shelves with empty chairs

2012-01-24T11:25:00.001-06:00

The post has to do with nothing more than my amusement at one firm's promotional material.

It appears that the current trend in academic libraries is to strategically reduce and relocate print collections. One of the reasons for this, as I understand, is to make more effective use of the space currently being occupied by print collections. The firm Sustainable Collection Services "offers deselection decision-support tools to academic libraries. SCS tools enable carefully managed drawdown of low-use print monograph collections while supporting shared print archiving efforts." And I was struck by their picture depicting why you might do this.

Apparently there is a great need for more empty tables and chairs!

(I've no disagreement with the service SCS is providing and am not intending to comment on the movement to reduce and relocate print collections. I just think an image of replacing full shelves with a bunch of empty tables and chairs does not do a very good job of motivating me.)

Portraits in Preservation - Jeff Peachey

2012-01-22T14:42:00.000-06:00

I'm pleased that Jeff Peachey agreed to be the 2nd participant in my Portraits in Preservation project. Please let me know if there is someone you would like to see profiled (or would like to volunteer yourself - don't feel shy).

Portrait of Jeff at work

BIO Jeffrey S. Peachey is the owner of a New York City-based studio for the conservation of books and the inventor of conservation tools and machines. He is a Professional Associate in the American Institute for Conservation and was Chair of the Conservators In Private Practice. For more than 20 years, he has specialized in the conservation of books and paper artifacts for institutions and individuals. He is a consultant to major libraries and university collections in the New York City region and nationally. He was the 2011 Sherman Fairchild Conservation Research Fellow at The Morgan Library & Museum. Current research interests include the tools, techniques and structures of eighteenth century French bookbinding. Jeff's blog is at: http://jeffpeachey.wordpress.com/

Describe an experience that was particularly influential in your professional development.

One of the first part time jobs I had in conservation as a technician was making protective enclosures, but occasionally I got to do something slightly more advanced, like cloth case rebacks. After a number of them, I distinctly recall the first one that I ever made that looked like something I hadn't made. In other words it looked more like it belonged to the book rather than to me. I'm not quite sure how to describe how it looked; it looked different than a sympathetic treatment or even well crafted repair. Even though I had made it, looked like something I had nothing to do with -- more objective than subjective -- neutral, subservient to object, rather than an example of my craft or treatment skills. There was something unselfconscious about it.

I still get this feeling when I look at some treatments, both mine and others, and strive for it. It is an entirely subjective perception, although perhaps no more that what is a judged to be 'sympathetic' treatment. Ironically, a current philosophical movement in book restoration, TomorrowsPast, seems to want to do just the opposite. They seem to advocate suffusing historic objects with various iterations of their personality and artistic vision.

When working on a book how do you understand your relationship with, or responsibility to, the person(s) who originally crafted the book?

Since most books are products of anonymous craftsmen, it seems the 'intent' of the craft object has to be determined from a larger knowledge of the cultural production of the time, rather than a specific worker. I guess there would be some distinct workshop practices, however, that one could develop a relationship or in-depth knowledge with.

How do you think working in preservation has shaped or changed your worldview?

It is difficult to say. Likely it produces a disconnect with current culture because of my hyperawareness of the importance of physical objects -- a bit out of step with current cultural assumptions concerning our virtual or digital existence. Or maybe it is just working alone most of the time! The past does seem a lot closer when you spend a lot of time working on older objects. I'm never sure quite how to respond when someone starts telling me about a 'really old' book from 1910 or something. Or when Apple recently announced that the ipad 2 is more durable than an old fashioned paper book. Huh?

What part of your preservation work most excites and engages you? Give specific examples.

At this point I seem to be following the typical trajectory: before conservation, more interested in visual arts, then bookbinding, later book conservation but most enthusiastic about doing treatments. Now I seem to have a more compelling interest in historical issues about bookbinding history and connoisseurship: how an object was made, what it meant to a culture and society, etc... Because we are on the cusp of most books shifting from primarily functional objects, we have a duty to not only conserve the objects, but what remains of the still alive craft . I really get a kick out of researching, writing and teaching about these issues.

If you were teaching what you do to a student, what would you say is the most important thing to learn in order to do your job well?

Looking, then making. Documenting, which not only records, but helps us to see more. Also, I'm always amazed how much a good teacher can help us see more. After careful observation comes making models, period bindings, reproductions, facsimiles, mock ups, dummies, replicas, maquettes, or historical reenactments -- whatever you want to call them, all in an attempt to understand more about a book's structure, function, material nature and mechanics.

Portraits in Preservation - Peter Verheyen

2012-01-12T05:37:00.001-06:00

This is a first in what I’m hoping will be a series of profiles of people who are involved in the library preservation world. My intent with this project not to write individual histories as it is to create personal portraits. My interest is the broader brush strokes of their life in preservation. My hope for this project is that these portraits will help the community of preservation professionals learn something about themselves – both individually and corporately – and their relationship to their profession. Thanks to Peter for being my first participant.

Selected Bio (from Syracuse University Library website)

Peter D. Verheyen began his involvement in preservation and conservation while a work-study student in the conservation lab at the Johns Hopkins University Library. He interned in the conservation lab of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, Germany, 1984 and 1986, and completed a formal apprenticeship in hand bookbinding at the Kunstbuchbinderei Klein in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, passing examinations in 1987. Studied at the Professional School for Book Restoration at the Centro del bel Libro in Ascona, Switzerland in 1987. Mellon intern in book conservation at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988. Worked in Chicago with Heinke Pensky-Adam at Monastery Hill Bindery and as assistant conservator to William Minter. In 1991 he began work as assistant conservator at the Yale University Library. In 1993 he became rare book conservator at the Cornell University Library, before establishing the conservation lab at the Syracuse University Library where he is now Head, Preservation and Conservation. He is past Exhibitions and Publicity Chair for the Guild of Book Workers. His bindings have been exhibited widely with the Guild, and in invitational and solo exhibitions throughout the USA and abroad. In 1994 he founded Book_Arts-L, in 1995 the Book Arts Web, and began publishing The Bonefolder: an e-journal for the bookbinder and book artist in 2004. A full vita can be found at http://www.philobiblon.com/vita.shtml.

Describe an experience that was particularly influential in your professional development.

The most significant one was landing a work-study job in the preservation department at Johns Hopkins when I was an undergrad. At that time John Dean had built up a very comprehensive apprentice training program for book conservators, and a full-fledged art on paper lab. John was amazingly generous with his time (and patience) and encouraged me to learn as much as I could, let me work on some personal (albeit very basic) binding projects and in general opened up the field to me. This was in 1981-85. Sensing I was serious he told me to take advantage of my dual citizenship and bilingual skills (German for both) and a) do an internship in a bindery conservation lab in Germany, and b) apply for formal apprenticeships, both of which I did.

Frank Mowery at the Folger also encouraged me in this. After 3+ years (formal apprenticeship and studies in conservation in Ascona) I returned to the US and began my career as a book conservator and binder. While trade binding and conservation may seem antithetical, those experiences taught me how to work, how to organize workflows and processes regardless of techniques and work at hand. These are skills that are very relevant for managing my own workflows and those of a larger lab with more space. The quantity of books bound during that apprenticeship also made most processes second nature, thus allowing me to focus on the details. As a conservator and now preservation department head, those experiences inform and reinforce my conviction that our work must meet not just the needs of an object, but also the greater needs of the collections and organization in terms of cost/benefit.

How do you think working in preservation has shaped or changed your worldview?

Hmmmm…. It has made me realize that it’s a miracle that as much has survived as has, and that the challenges of print preservation are nothing compared to what we are increasingly dealing with in the form of preservation of the digital. Digital for preservation is just a tool, but the preservation of the digital is necessary to ensure that those “artifacts” will endure. While hands on conservation will not help with the preservation of the digital, the fact that we work with materials that despite, or in spite of condition can still be used after hundreds of years is a good perspective. In addition we’ll need to adjust our treatment approaches to support digitization for preservation, something that involves accepting that we may not be able to treat to the level we feel the object needs. This was a great topic of at the 2011 AIC meeting.

What part of your preservation work most excites and engages you? Give specific examples.

While no longer working at the bench unless training staff/students or otherwise teaching, I find that preservation involves endless creative problem sets. It’s not just how do we treat this item, but how do we clean/protect 1 million plus volumes, and how can I develop my skills to learn to deal with new formats (film, video, audio, etc.). Syracuse has been a leader in audio preservation and is about to dive into video. These are growth areas for us, but also for most research libraries as how we record information and history evolves.

If you were teaching what you do to a student, what would you say is the most important thing to learn in order to do your job well?

Become a sponge, a lifelong learner, someone who continually strives to develop the skills (hand, research, analytical) to evolve with the job. Invest in yourself at all levels with professional development, developing a resource library, tools, etc. Take risks, look beyond the immediate confines of the field, ask questions and question. Learn how to provide the greatest cost/benefit with the work one does. Continually look at the landscape in your work environment even (or especially) if it doesn’t relate to preservation – how are things changing in terms of use, resources ($$$), organizational structure? Actively seek out the intersections with preservation and identify ways to get on everyone else’s radar. Be willing to adapt and change. Don’t hide, stand out. While it is very easy to be seduced by romantic notions of the field – they are nice and I was (still am to a degree) – things are volatile and the field writ large is changing too fast. These skills are essential for success and survival.

Bonus question (optional) - What do you preserve and why?

I love history and problem solving. We will not be able to save everything, but we should help save as much as we can. I also love working with the materials, and books as 3-D mechanical objects are fascinating.

Post-Modern Pluralism and Library Preservation

2012-01-10T18:37:00.000-06:00

My final post coming out of last year’s project to read and respond to a variety of books is perhaps my most challenging post to write because in the midst of reading one book I added a second book, and neither book is about libraries, and one book is only tangentially about preservation. I think the two books have something to say to changing understandings of cultural institutions, changing understandings of conservation, and ultimately to changing understandings of authority.

The two books are Letting Go: SharingHistorical Authority in a User Generated World edited by Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, published in 2011; and Conservation in the Age of Consensus by John Pendlebury, published in 2009.

Letting Go speaks out of and to the public history and museum community and essentially tackles the issue of how to understand and where to situate authority in a user-generated, participatory museum context. What is the role of the professional and of expertise when you move from the elites telling the stories of the elites, to elites telling the stories of the non-elites, to non-elites telling the stories?

The volume is an enjoyable, colorful and well illustrated collection of chapters in a variety of formats including interviews, case studies, and thought pieces. The volume was an interesting read for me in part because the specifics of the subject matter are all quite new to me, and it is eye-opening to see how this profession is dealing with these challenges. But more importantly, the issues and concepts that are raised in this book, especially of situating authority, are certainly relevant to the world of libraries and even library preservation.

A potential distinction between the world of public history and library preservation is that of interpretation. Communicating history is all about interpretation and context, while the library preservation world generally hands over the task of interpretation to curators and readers. History is told through objects and texts which must be preserved but our work tends to be of a technical nature and it’s hard to understand how cultural context might influence preservation decisions.

Several of the chapters had interesting discussions of the place of expertise in a user generated context and how expertise relates to authority. I was most taken by Kathleen McLean who writes in “Whose Questions, Whose Conversation?” “We also need to separate our own notions of about expertise and knowledge-generation from the associated concept of ‘authority’ … The assumption that expertise inherently confers authority and power makes it almost impossible to support the open invitation to conversation and exploration that is essential to live in museums.” (p. 71-72)

While reading Letting Go I glanced through my notebook and saw at a while back I had written in the margins the title Conservation in the Age of Consensus. I knew nothing more about this book than its title and the Consensus word suggested to me that this book might also tackle the issue of situating authority.

Conservation in the Age of Consensus is about preservation of buildings and built environments in the UK and very much like the Letting Go book it discusses the transition from an elite, professionally driven approach to a more community involved focus. This too turned out to be an enjoyable read which resulted in pages and pages of quotes and notes – so much so that I don’t know where to begin (or end).

Pendlebury takes a closer and more systematic look at how the transition from elite driven to a more community-oriented understanding of conservation, and the related shifts in understanding of authority fit within the larger post-modern context. While his use of conservation is always directed at building conservation, much of what he says easily extends to other areas of cultural heritage conservation.

He perceives conservation as thoroughly seated in the intellectual world of modernity. “Conservation, though it has sought to adapt to the uncertainties of the contemporary world, in an intrinsically ‘modern’ sensibility, relying on an ethically based rationalism, involving, for example, scientific principles of selection and emphasis on authenticity of material fabric.” (p. 217) The primary interest of modern conservation is authenticity and related to that is the authority to declare that authenticity is important, and the authority to declare what is authentic.

In shifting toward a post-modern approach to conservation we begin to shift the underlying rationale for conservation from moral precepts and authenticity to considering things like economic and popular interests. “There are, however, significant dangers for the conservation sector in pursuing an agenda of diversity and pluralism, not least where the values of the wider public are found to diverge from those of professionals.” (p.186)

Pendlebury, who is both insightful and self-aware, adds a further wrinkle to this endeavor to a community driven conservation “Underpinning the drift towards pluralism and inclusion as part of official conservation policy-making is an assumption that communities want to be empowered and engaged into the arena of formalised cultural heritage.” (p. 203) He also raises the very real possibility of what happens if the authority ceded by the cultural elite is taken up by the economic elite?

As I was reading this book and thinking of how the UK world of building conservation compares to the US world of library preservation the issue of who gets to decide what is preserved and what that preservation looks like was an interesting contrast. Building conservation in the UK, and it seems also in the US, are guided by government policies at the federal, state, and local levels. Except for perhaps the functioning of government/legislative libraries I am not aware of any real government policies directed at preserving published material. Federal agencies provide some leadership and funding – which is perhaps more successful at directing results than simply setting policies – but I’d be curious to see any examples of legislative action directing preservation of library materials.

So, yes, Letting Go and Conservation in the Age of Consensus are two quite different books that have little directly to do with library preservation, but that doesn’t mean they don’t raise issues important for the library preservation world to ponder. I think the library preservation community would benefit from following the lead presented in these books and take a closer look at itself and its conception of authority.

I'm still not certain how the library preservation world fits, or can fit, into a more post-modern, pluralistic framework. For example: is there such a thing as a feminist critique of preservation? I can't bring myself to say "no", but I guess I'm not bright enough to know what it might be.

Part of the challenge, as I see it, is that we in the library preservation community tend to approach library preservation as a technical concern - there are physical materials which have physical problems which we respond to with physical treatments. It is hard to find the interpretive issues, cultural influences in that. It's a bit like looking for culturally influenced plumbing practices - they might be there but it seems like you would have to look pretty hard.

With no intentions to dismiss the intricacies of good plumbing, I would like to think that the library preservation community deals with concepts larger than good craftsmanship and technical know-how. Intellectually, how does library preservation cope with the pluralism of a post-modern world where their profession may not be the sole arbiter of preservation authority?

A further question that arises for me out of this reading is where does the library preservation community situate authority. Is it in standards? Is it in the "wisdom of the elders?" Is it in that which produces a more usable/marketable product? I'm guessing that a whole-hearted discussion within the library preservation community of what we accept as authoritative might start to reveal some of our own interpretive differences and differing levels of "letting go."

Year End Thoughts, and New Year plans

2012-01-01T19:16:00.000-06:00

It seems the thing to do for blog writers to look back on the year that was - so here goes:

My intent for this blog for this year was to read and interact with a bunch of books circling around the topics of "library preservation theory" and "cultural heritage institutions". I feel like I read a lot and it was a good learning experience for me. (I now have a notebook with pages and pages and pages of notes and quotes.) I moved outside my original topics of interest, if only because there just isn't much to read in the area of "library preservation theory" - I wish there was, but no. Moving beyond my original topics of interest has been a rewarding experience as well.

I still have one book response blog post to write - hopefully soon.

I have a new plan/project for this blog for this new year - one that will be a stretch. Rather than focus on the preservation related stuff people have written, I want to focus on the preservation related people themselves. I've said before that I think conservators, and other preservation professionals, are the least studied and least written about part of the preservation world. So, I want to focus on the people who are actively involved in preservation activities, especially library related preservation activities. I want to interview these people about their life in preservation. I'm a bit anxious about this next project because I'm not one who naturally approaches people to ask things of them (I don't like to impose myself upon others) and we are a community of professionals who don't have a tradition of public self-reflection - we reflect on objects and techniques, not on ourselves. I've not yet developed the format this new project will take.

A few other year-end blog related thoughts:
This blog has not been as popular (if page views are a measure of popularity) as my previous blog. I'm not too surprised or disappointed about this as the content and format of this blog are arguably geared at a narrower audience. (Plus I rarely post job ads which always got a lot of traffic on my previous blog.) While I am not speaking to a large crowd, I do hope that some of what has appeared on this blog this past year has been at least a little helpful, informative, or interesting to a few people now and then.

What I am annoyed about, however, is that my former blog, which I killed and took offline, some charlatan managed to partially resurrect (or zombify) and that site still shows up much higher than my current blog on web searches.That just ticks me off.

Collecting and Immortality

2011-12-30T07:08:00.000-06:00

I've often thought that collecting is the first, and possibly most important, step in preservation.

About a year ago Preservation & Conservation Administration News posted my "A Conservator Ponders Impermanence" where I boldly (foolishly) stated

Personally, I tend to think the quest for permanence, or the unacknowledged reality of impermanence, is rooted in our fear of our own mortality and the fear that we won‘t be remembered (preserved) when we are dead and gone.

This morning I was glancing at the New York Times online and noticed their Room for Debate section was about collecting. Most of the entries were about the thin line between collecting and hoarding - which doesn't interest me much - but the first piece by Philipp Blom, Objects of Desire and Dreams, caught my attention. It is very short so just go read it, but I'll quote one line.

The objects and their organization bind us to something larger than ourselves, and as religion was born out of a fear of death and the wish of eternal life, collecting expresses the same fundamental urges.

I don't know that I have anything more to add - just that I'm intrigued and pleased that my year begins and ends with considering the ultimate motivations for our collecting and preserving endeavors.

Gary Frost’s "Future of the Book" book

2011-11-26T18:50:00.000-06:00

To describe Gary Frost as the influential, emeritus conservator from the University of Iowa does not quite do him justice. Gary Frost is part conservator, part futurist, and part mystic (to name just a few of his parts.) Under his name on the title page of my copy his recent book I wrote “book shaman.”

Upon retiring he has very quickly come out with two books Adventures in Book Conservation: An Album of Investigations and Future of the Book: A Way Forward (both available from Iowa Book Works). I’ve only read the Future of the Book one, yet.

For those who read Frost’s blog, also called Future of the Book, the print book Future of the Book: A Way Forward will be familiar territory. The fact that much of this content can now be read both on screen and now in print goes to the heart of what Frost discusses in his book – the interplay between print reading and screen reading.

I once took a course on the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It was a fascinating class but I found myself taking very few notes. My explanation of why this might be the case was that while note taking tends to move in a very linear direction, the professor’s thoughts and communications were better described as an interlocking web where everything was connected to everything else (at least so it seemed to the students).

Reading Frost reminds me of this class experience. In this book, a detailed description of the elegant parabola of the spine of a sewn-board volume (p. 43) is only pages away from a discussion of the “functions of self-authentication of print and self-indexing of electronic text.” (p. 46)

Frost’s world of the book is vast and detailed and it’s all interconnected. Following him as he traverses those connections is a challenging delight or a delightful challenge. There were times during my reading I found myself lost and sometimes the intricacies of his language eluded me, but I would eventually once again find his path and enjoy the adventure.

This book is Frost’s rumination on a topic of huge importance to today’s library community (whether it knows it or not) the interplay of the print book and the digital text. While he is a print apologist, it not because he feels digital is inferior, but rather his is a response to the trend within the library world to look away from print and see digital as a replacement for print.

I was intrigued to see early on in the book that he compares the transition from the print deliver of the book to screen delivery not to the creation of the printing press, as is so often done, but to the movement from primary orality to print. The scale of the change is that great. This shift should force us, as it does Frost, to give closer examination to both print and digital – how do they do what they do and what are the characteristics of the reader experience for each. “Display of a given title to both screen and print is not equivalent either in attributes of the different delivery formats or in their roles of interaction.” (p. 16)

Frost’s main argument is that digital does not replace print. Frost’s defense of print is not based on nostalgia, or as is so common, the smell of old books, but on the unique attributes of the materiality and reading experience of print. “Contrasting functionalities of the paper and screen book do not converge, but they complement each other.” (p. 17) “Print attributes of content fixity, manual navigation, and persistent access across time all pair nicely with screen attributes of live content, automated search and navigation, cloud repository, and electronic delivery.” (p. 19)

And now, to give my reader a greater sense of the experience of reading Frost’s book born out of his web of knowledge, the subsequent chapter begins with a discussion of dexterity and brain size in early hominids. Yup, it’s all connected and you’ve just got to try and keep up.

In further advancing the of the print book/reader interaction Frost discusses various binding methods and observes the interplay of the actions of these bindings with the reader’s reading of the text. Of his beloved wooden board binding he writes,

“The mind is physically positions in the content and memory and insight both are augmented by the physical location of concepts. Fingering to initiate and complete page turnings points to the particular expressions or precepts that are read. Manual transmission of leverage from the board covers to the text is so responsive that it embodies comprehension and conclusive acts of learning.” (p. 41)

Oh, and then there’s several pages about the linotype – Frost loves the linotype, and find a way to naturally weave it into his web of the book.

In light of the recent discussion at GBW standards of Tomorrow’s Past and the Bonefolder’sBind-O-Rama “Artistically Reversible: Where Conservation and Art Meet” it was interesting to read Frost declare “I have often imagined that there can be deliberate recognition of artful book conservation treatments and some definitions of an aesthetic to guide the practice.” (p. 56) The book’s section covering an aesthetic approach to conservation (pp. 54-59) deserves some in-depth engagement which is more than will happen in this review. (I would love to see some others tackle the issues discussed in these pages.)

As mentioned, Frost’s book is titled Future of the Book: A Way Forward but within Frost’s labyrinthine web of the book, the way forward may not always be forward. It may sometimes lead us inward, or outward, to the left, or to the right, and often to places that we never imaged the book would take us.

Finding the Conservator in Conservation

2011-11-13T11:34:00.000-06:00

I think the conservator is the least studied, the least written about, and the least understood part of the conservation world.

Before this year’s Guild of BoodWorkers Standards a gathering was held to discuss the issues surrounding the Tomorrow’s Past movement and the Bonefolder’s most recent iteration of Bind-O-Rama, Artisitically Reversible – Where Conservation and Art Meet. The aim of the Bind-O-Rama and the gathering was “to explore the movement's tenets of providing new, conservationally sound clothes to old books.” (For more context please see the article in The Bonefolder, Vol 7, by Charles Gledhill, the Tomorrow's Past web pages, and this post at the Riverlark blog entitled Old wine in new bottles.)

I think another title for the event could be Finding the Conservator in Conservation.

On the face of it, however, the conversation was about the tenets of the Tomorrow’s Past movement to provide “new, conservationally sound clothes to old books.”

“Why,” event organizer Karen Hanmer asks “in 2011 make something look like something that was done in 1500?”

The Tomorrow’s Past movement is about doing good conservation using an aesthetic that may not be fully sympathetic to the period of the piece. This naturally leads to the question, where and when is it acceptable to insert the conservator’s aesthetic into our conservation work? There is a sense that the conservator is to be invisible in their work. Their conservation treatment may be visible in their work, but they should not be. This may be an illusory goal but we are uncertain as to how overt the conservator should be in putting their own stamp on their work. How does incorporating the conservator’s aesthetic fit into the AIC Code of Ethics?

Suzy Morgan’s rebinding of a very tattered volume incorporating a spine entirely of Mylar was discussed as an example of this approach to conservation. See links for a full gallery of pictures, and a blogdescription of the project.

There was an interesting side-bar conversation about reversibility and the increasing acknowledgment that this is an impossible goal. More satisfying alternate treatment goals of “retreatable” and “suitable” were offered.

At one point a person (sorry I don’t know who it was, but it was a woman) states what I think was the subtext, and the real heart of the conversation “We are inserting ourselves into the lives of these books, no matter how sympathetic we pretend it is.”

Conservators become intimately, physically involved with the items they work on and intentionally or not, become part of that item’s being. There is however a discomfort, as this conversation reveals, with how overt our relationship with these objects can be. Should others be able to look at a book that was conserved and recognize who did the work? I’m going to guess that some would say no – the conservator should vanish into the “woodwork” or into the grain of the paper. Is it okay for a conservator to do something in a conservation job which is not “necessary” to the conservation of the piece and reveals something of the conservator?

While I think the idea of the invisible conservator is impossible and wrong and should not be a goal, I also do not advocate for a conservator’s self-expression free-for-all. This issue of how much of our selves do we put in our work must always be held in thoughtful and professional tension.

The author, the binder, the seller, the conservator, and the reader are all part of the community that creates and interprets our written cultural heritage. Understanding who these various members are only helps deepen our understanding of this heritage.

I am thankful for those who participated in the discussion, and took the efforts to record and share itonline. I also hope we continue to discuss not only the work of conservation, but also the life of the conservator.

Family memories and film conversion

2011-11-06T07:12:00.000-06:00

I always enjoy the opportunity to watching and listening to people who are experienced experts talk about and demonstrate their trade. I’ve had interesting conversations with the state demographer about the art and science of the census. I’ve toured and observed the operation of a small Amish chair manufacturer. I’ve learned fascinating things about insects and ecology from my two entomologist friends.

Recently, I had the great opportunity to spend a fascinating afternoon learning about the world of audio/visual materials conversion. Oh, and I heard a lot of stories.

A while ago I took on the project of digitizing my parents’ slides and when they delivered the slides there were also a handful of reels of old 8mm home movies. I recalled that a couple years ago I had sold an antique film projector to a guy who mentioned that he did film conversion and gave me his card. After about 3 years of carrying his card in my wallet I finally had some film to convert and gave the guy a call.

Carl has been in the “business” his entire life. He is 72. He began at 11 by running the projector at the junior high. He also got in with the guys who ran the projectors at the local theaters and spent a lot of time there. His working career was in radio and tv as well as owning a few movie theaters. Now he is “retired” but maintains an impressive operation out of a cramped corner of his house.

When I made contact with him about getting the film transferred to dvd I also asked about the opportunity to see his operation. He was more than glad to oblige.

He showed me all the equipment he used, how it worked, where he got it, and the various modifications he made. In his small site he can transfer 8mm, Super8, and 16mm film, reel to reel audio, cassette tapes, and 33/45/78 records, as well as any foreign and domestic video tape format, and slides.

He then offered to do my film transfer while I was there so I could watch the whole process. I gleefully said yes. Early on in the process he said something, which I then also observed, which caught my attention. “Every inch of the film will run through my hands several times during the process.” As one who is interested in hand skills, and in training people’s hands to repair books, it was intriguing to see the role his experienced hands played in this much more technologically driven process.

The process began by him rolling the film onto a large reel as he checks the condition of the film, testing old splices, making new splices where the film is broken, and dealing with any other condition issues. Two of the smaller reels had some mold on them, and part of one reel had been fed into a projector wrong causing a very jagged edge. He was quite concerned about whether this part of the film would cause problems. He then cleaned and lubricated the film – all by hand.

Parent's wedding

After checking, fixing, and cleaning the film he loaded a reel on his 8mm transfer machine. The machine looks a bit like a film projector except the light source – an array of LEDs – is where the lens would typically be. Conversion is done in real time so my just over 600 feet of film took just under an hour to do. It was a thrill to see this film which I don’t recall ever seeing before. The film was from the early sixties and included my parent’s wedding, my older brother as an infant, and a vacation trip to South Dakota. The image quality wasn’t great, but the color was phenomenal. Carl explained that Kodachrome does a phenomenal job of retaining color, while if it was shot on Ektachrome, everything would be moving to shades of magenta.

In the audio/visual branch of the library preservation world, digitization is seen as the best hope for preservation. While paper folk may complain about acidic paper, the media we work with is in general much more stable than the various audio visual media.

The film I had transferred is now burnt on 4 dvds, and will also be copied to a hard drive or two and will be dispersed to various family members who are dispersed across the continent. So, abiding by the principle of Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe, the stuff of these family films should now have a better chance of surviving into another generation. (But really, the best part was talking to an old guy about craft and technology.)

Reading Libricide

2011-10-23T13:07:00.001-05:00

Libricide: The Regime Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century [I can't believe I forgot to name the author when I first posted this. The author is Rebecca Knuth]

I begin my book review by giving away my conclusion, Libricide is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It’s clearly written, it’s smart, it tells stories, and it challenges the reader (at least this reader) to look at things in new ways.

I admit, however, when I initially saw that this book is written by an LIS faculty (at the University of Hawaii) I was skeptical of the author’s ability to rigorously understand, analyze, and communicate these complex situations she was writing about. Nothing in my library training taught me how to analyze the cause and expressions of genocide and ethnic cleansing, so I had some doubts over the author’s ability to do so. I was wrong. (I was probably projecting my own ignorance of the book’s topic.)

The book begins with three chapters of a more theoretical nature discussing the function of libraries, ethnocide, and her argument to place libricide within the framework of ethnocide. The next five chapters provide well documented case studies of twentieth century examples of systematic library destruction including Nazi Germany, Greater Serbia, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, China’s cultural revolution, and China and Tibet. (Despite the subject matter, while it is not a “light” book, it is very engaging.)

“My project began with these two questions. What really distinguishes those who mourn the destruction of books and libraries from those who willingly, even joyfully, throw books into the fire? And how can these ideals of human progress be reconciled with the mass violence and destruction of culture that characterized the twentieth century.” (p. viii)

This is a bit of a glib aside, but her line about those who “joyfully thrown books into the fire” reminded me that one of my tasks at a public library I used to work at was to discard the discards. Books that had been deaccessioned by library staff and were not deemed salable for the Friends sale were unceremoniously (and often quite gleefully) tossed in the dumpster. The dumpster was behind the library but right next to one of the town’s larger streets. I was surprised that I never heard of people complaining when the saw me toss cartloads of books into the dumpster. Now, I know how some people feel about “books” like they are some kind of sacred object never to be violated. Well, they can be, but they can also be unnecessary dust-collecting wastes of space. </aside>

The primary case Knuth attempts to make – and succeeds – is that libricide belongs within the category of ethnocide – or more precisely “libricide is an identifiable secondary pattern or sub-phenomena occurring within the framework of genocide and ethnocide” (p. viii)

The following set of quotes lay out Knuth’s rationale for why libraries and the texts they hold within them matter, and then, why their destruction matters.

“Texts, especially when part of a diverse collection, are vital in sustaining a group’s uniqueness and protecting the group from the homogeneity promoted by extremists.” (p.9)

“The turn toward memory is subliminally energized by the desire to anchor ourselves in a world characterized by an increasing instability of time and the fracturing of lived space.” (p. 18)

“Something else must be at stake that produces the desire for the past in the first place and that makes us respond so favorably to the memory markets. That something, I would suggest, is a slow but palpable transformation of temporality in our lives, brought on by the complex intersections of technological change, mass media, and new patters of consumption, work and global mobility.” (p. 21)

“Regimes that commit genocide also destroy the material expressions of their victims’ culture, books and libraries.” (p. 6)

“Because books and libraries preserve memory, provide witness, store evidence of the validity of a multitude of perspectives, facilitate intellectual freedom, and support group identity, they are carefully controlled, sanitized, and even extensively purged.” (p. 81)

“A hindrance to the politicization of scholarship, the physicality of the written records displays a stubborn quality of witness and anchors legitimate methods of historical research.” (p. 31)

She writes that the “physicality of the written displays a stubborn quality of witness” but this physicality can also be a weakness. When an archive of unique physical texts is destroyed, they are all destroyed. Digital media, however, can more easily allow for a more distributed network of ownership and preservation – ala LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.) Destroying one library means less if same material is duplicated all over the place. With singular possession there is a greater vulnerability and risk of real loss. I think the idea of distributed ownership is one of the real preservation strengths we can learn from the digital community. I still hear people, even people who work primarily in the digital world, speak of a desire for central repositories when speaking of either print or digital collections, but it seems to me that a central repository model is both managerially unnecessary, and too high a preservation risk. Distributed and redundant networks seem to me to be the best model for real preservation.

“Libraries support official beliefs and ideologies, while at the same time bringing about social change by nurturing and transmitting new understanding.” (p. 35)

“Because libraries express the humanist and democratic values that have come to characterize modern society and internationalism, violence directed at them is also an attack on these ideals, serving instead a worldview in which the individual being exists solely to serve the collective vision of the state.” (p. 49)

To me, this statement of violence directed at libraries is an attack on the ideals of humanism bring up hints of “They attacked us because they hate our freedoms.” Cf G. Bush. To generally say that an attack on a library means “X” seems a too broadly stated.

As I said at the beginning of this post I’m a cautious reader when reading a library science professor explaining the rise of Nazism. I can’t very well argue that she’s wrong, as I don’t know much about the rise of Nazism, but I’m only willing to grant her limited authority on the topic – especially when she uses phrases like “cultural predisposition towards romanticism.” (p. 76)

“The violence and public nature of destruction often observed the fact that the ruin was a practical means of destroying information that contradicted the myths of the regime or substantiated the claims of other ethnic or political groups to resource or territory.” (p. 236)

Anyone who has seen video of the Texas Board of Education reviewing and editing potential school textbooks has seen examples of destroying or deleting information that contradicts the myths of the regime.

In this book the author wrote very much about political and ideological forces behind the destruction of libraries and books. One of my challenges or questions in response to this book is about other forces that might motivate destruction. I’m wondering if and how commercial forces might play into this discussion. By and large, corporations don’t go in and destroy libraries, but they do exercise a great deal of control over what texts get produced and increasingly how libraries interact with these texts through licensing agreements. The book discusses very large scale overt destructions. How might this relate to much smaller and more subtle efforts of censorship and the like?

“It is unclear whether humanists and internationalists alone perceive the destruction of books and libraries to be in violation of the social contract or whether there is a level of consensus across value systems. In other words, is the preservation of culture a universal objective or is it specific to Western sensibilities.” (p. 249)

Knuth goes through the entire book with this idea that destroying books and libraries is wrong, but in the end, ponders whether the idea that this is wrong is solely a Western idea. This then is the seemingly never-ending challenge of living in a pluralistic world with conflicting worldviews.

Transitioning to a Digital Future - afternoon session

2011-10-20T14:20:00.000-05:00

Okay - here's my notes dump for the afternoon speakers. Once again, these notes are completely unedited and unprocessed. I will say I found the last speaker - Charles Henry of CLIR - fascinating, especially the bit about the relationship between preservation and scholarly interpretation.
(Also, I had some nice online chatting with Peter Verheyen during the session!)

Grant Funders Panel Discussion

Eryl Wentworth, Executive Director, Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation

Howard Wactlar, Director for Information and Intelligent Systems, Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), National Science Foundation

Charles Thomas, Acting Associate Deputy Director for Library Services, Institute of Museum and Library Services

FAIC, IMLS, NSF

Eryl – FAIC – excels at professional development –

We need to develop/harness volunteer passion and energy

Excited about Emerging Leaders in Conservation group. Have skills and energy to do more advocacy work

There is an interest in AIC to create a preventive conservation/Collection Care division.

Howard of NSF – two pieces to preservation world – preserving information, but biggest opportunity/challenge is preserving experience

Eg. Ways of recreating walk through national park.

Charles of IMLS

More important than ever when thinking about the numbers of items and digital materials – need to think about selection. Focus on crowd-source to help with selection/curation.

New type of planning grant – national forum grants – discuss across institution types and make recommendations.

Re: selection for digital preservation – storage is cheap, but preservation/management/retrieval isn’t.

Importance of local and national perspectives.

Big question with IMLS preservation grants is whether preservation policies developed by large institutions work well when applied to a smaller organization. Need to develop/test different models and how they work in different contexts.

IMLS funds grants for preservation research – like energy efficient storage environments.

NSF guy thinks we should record/preserve everything – not yet able to decide. Disk storage at 3.5 cents/gigabyte.

Defer decisions about what it is okay to forget. Hold off on that decision as long as we can.

Don’t worry about reformatting – the cloud and the market will figure that out for us?!?!

(He seems quite fond of the commercial marketplace as driving how preservation changes.)

Eryl – C2C as an example of a program that takes preservation issues to smaller institutions. Survived a shift of organization/leadership. – now its C2c online

Research – storage/environmental issues.

FAIC assumed responsibility for Conservation Online. The archive is a relic itself. Many conservators don’t use it. ConsDistList however is very popular/used. Now getting some proposals to think about how to use CoOL to provide current information – with interactive component.

Shared management becomes more complicated at a local level – have little spare capacity/resources to contribute.

Workforce issues – need for qualified preservation staff. Very few training opportunities to meet demand. IMLS sponsors a few fellowships.

Funded a demonstration project to build a community storage site for people to place own digital info – with option to share it or not.

NSF guy – what are the next steps. Reformulate our needs as technical or scientific problems.

Until scientific community is adequately faced with the need they are not going to address the problem.

Eryl – back to workforce issue. Training future leaders. Samuel H. Kress funded FAIC conservation fellowship.

Recurring issue with AIC – public outreach/education.

IMLS – interest in archives administration continues to grow.

A Mirror Held, The Future Reflected

Charles Henry, President, Council of Library and Information Resources

He said "Chock-a-block"

4 programs in higher education in humanities – preservation of cultural records will involve humanists. New concepts coming out of humanistic research.

1. Relationship between preservation and scholarly interpretation.

- in this era of amazing ability to see within artifacts – previously unseen. This will influence interpretation. Continuity of decision-making that leads and helps determine interpretation of that object. Line of thinking between preservation and scholar. Need to focus on the whole spectrum of engagement. Those interpretations can influence further preservation

2. New forms of scholarly research in humanities. E.g. Digging into data. Humanists and computer scientists collaborations. Looking at 56,000 quilts that had been digitized. 14^th c. French manuscripts. 17-18^th maps. All three projects looking for patterns.

With the maps – was there a way you could trace a lineage of authorship. Same with manuscripts.

With quilts – what’s a crazy quilt and what’s not. Discerning lineage of authorship.

Big question – what is authorship and how is cultural tradition passed over time.

Terabytes of data and many algorithms. Algorithms hold true for many other disciplines. Where is this data going to go? This project executed in an environment with no preservation plan.

All these projects require new kinds of academic expression.

3. Project will be announced in a month – federated research and educational depository system. (FREDS) UVa, Mich, Emory, Stanford. Preserving academic record. 3 or 4 dark archives run on different platforms. Redundancy of archives but not of operating systems.

We are subject to a catastrophic loss of digital info.

4. Digital Public Library of America. DPLA. National roll-out tomorrow. Could become a vast federation of American cultural heritage objects. If it’s done well, it could be one of the greatest resources we’ve ever seen. DPLA won’t own digital objects, only federate them. Preservation is not mentioned anywhere in this project. Exhilarating and indicative.

Transitioning to a Digital Future - morning notes

2011-10-20T11:18:00.000-05:00

I'm watching the webcast of the Transitioning to a Digital Future - part of the Future Directions Symposia put on by the Preservation Dept. at the Library of Congress.

I've been taking notes as I watch and rather than take the time to edit and analyze I'll just throw them up online in their incredible ragged form. (It's just me typing things I hear that might be interesting as I hear them.)

I'm hoping to be able to stay attached to my computer this afternoon to hear those speakers as well. They will be posting this online at some point.

Morning speakers

Deanna Marcum

The Library of Congress’ Role as Leader: Addressing Past, Present, and Future Preservation Needs.

(I hate introductions)

History of national programs – tried many efforts at preservation at a national level

LC established National Preservation Program – funded by CLIR

Note on the early stuff LC did was the result of funding LC received – funders (especially CLIR) shape preservation.

The bench conservators will get training – people not getting training are people who manage preservation. (this was said a long time ago – and its still the case)

Austin money from CLIR was aimed solely at administration.

Today – no program and no money for Pres Admin. “It is not enough for conservators to become managers.”

“No congress can commit another congress.” 20 year LC programs are really only year by year programs.

We are losing national preservation planning.

Need to critically address current preservation technology – especially mass-deacidification.

Preservation @ LC – past LC thought of itself as library of last resort – does it need to think of itself as library of first stop – and how does that affect their approach to preservation

Digitization’s relationship to microfilming.

“We have to ask – what are we going to do with all this microfilm? If people don’t use it, what good is it?”

Made an enormous investment into microfilm – need to invest in reformatting the microfilm.

We only need to make it digitally accessible once – work on this collaboratively. (Not sure I agree – diversity of efforts bring benefits.)

Print repositories – component missing – no real provisions for these collections. Needs to be more NB

Think about need for reformatting as managers and not as preservation experts.

Can’t save everything – let’s be smart about what we preserve.

“What must we save as artifacts to properly serve next generation?”

Do we need “trusted organizations” devoted to digital preservation. Currently we are all “playing around” with. Wants a national plan run by a national org to set the standard.

Education. Reason for fall by the wayside of these programs is mostly economic. Wants preservation taught in all library science programs. Make sure “our” voices are being heard.

Richard Kurin (Smithsonian) A Good Old Mission in a New World

Have 137.2 million things (not counting archives/records)

(their bird collection is used to analyze the bird-plane strikes)

Pushing social media – encyclopedia of life –

Stamp museum – 6 million stamps – 4 curators. Use a professional crowd-source site.

Leaf snap app – take a picture of a leaf and it figures out what you’ve got.

Stephanie Toothman – National Park Service

“Preservation Plus Access to Americas Collections, Ecosystems, Buildings, and Historic Sites”

NPS use of the web to connect people to parks and programs

Digitized National Register – aid in appropriately responding to disasters.

C(ultural)R(esource)GIS

With digital images – can now accept color digital images. (With photographic images only accepted black & white documentation)

No current good option for guaranteeable permanent digital signature.

David Ferriero,

Overwhelming Evidence: Preserving 12+ Billion Records for Permanent Access

Describes himself as a “preservation junkie”

In past, under Cunha he oiled leather bindings – laminated things

Created Duke preservation program.

Nation’s record keeper – provides courtesy storage for Congress.

10 billion pages, 40 million photographs, 7 million charts, drawings, maps

Fed records law still doesn’t recognize electronic records (print and save)

Greatest challenges – have 210 email records from Bush white house (not one of them is Bush’s)

Just received 331 terabytes of records from Census

Electronic Records Administration.

External Collaborative Opportunities – our costs are going up, need more funding

- expand preservation and access through cooperation

- share strength and work together to make voice heard

- more exchanged between institutions

Midwest Jobs

2011-10-13T20:10:00.000-05:00

I've intentionally not used this blog to repost job opportunities as PCAN does a fine job of covering the job postings that appear on PADG and ConsDistList - but I think the latest flurry of conservation postings deserves a little special mention - because they are all in the Midwest.

Conservator at the University of Iowa. Follow in Gary Frost's footsteps. Work with Nancy Kraft in a highly respected program. And they will pay you. What more could you ask for? (On a related aside - Gary Frost wrote a small book. I ordered it. You'll hear about it soon.)

Conservation Lab Manager at the Public Library of Cincinnati. This is an intriguing new venture with the University of Cincinnati. The Public Library was awarded an LSTA grant to establish a joint lab with the University. (I'll be curious if the public library angle will deter some applicants because I'll guess most people going into conservation don't anticipate working for a public library.)

Conservator at the University of Chicago. A city with a rich history of conservation and an all-around great city.

Libraries are the new Newspapers

2011-10-03T18:02:00.000-05:00

I've long seen a connection between libraries and newspapers, both are collectors and distributors of locally important information. So, I was intrigued when I read on Library Journal's site that IMLS had awarded Florida's Orange County Library System a $50,000 National Leadership Grant to develop an open obituaries database.

Obituaries have long been an incredibly popular service of local newspapers but as newspapers reduce their size, or vanish altogether, some of the important information they collected and provided is no longer being gathered.

I am a bit curious, however, about their procedure for gathering obituary information. The project "envisions family and friends of the deceased submitting detailed obituaries, including videos, photographs, or other memorabilia." This kind of self-selected offering of information has the potential to create to a very off-kilter database. I'll be curious if they seek out other sources of info as well.

I hope this project succeeds in finding new ways to gather and present obituary information, and provokes new ways for libraries to enhance their role in collecting, preserving, and presenting locally important information.

My intern report

2011-09-27T17:09:00.000-05:00

Recently, I posted the reflections of Cyndy my summer book repair intern. What follows is my own reflections on leading an internship.

Leading an internship has been the most rewarding experience of my career. I’ve done a lot of different things in my library work. I’ve dressed up as the Cat in the Hat (twice), I’ve travelled the state visiting interesting collections and cataloging their newspapers, I’ve taught workshops and library school courses, but leading an internship has been the most satisfying experience. I also think it has been the most effective educational experience I’ve participated in.

The two internships I’ve lead have been focused around learning and practicing skills. With Jolien, my first intern we worked on paper conservation, and with Cyndy, book repair. The interns came in with some theoretical knowledge, but very little hands-on experience. My goal was to provide them an experience of progressive learning and plenty of opportunities to practice, practice, and practice again.

Cyndy starting to sew a text block.

Cyndy contacted me this spring and expressed a desire to do an internship. The first thing that came to mind was a conservation internship and that felt like it would require more of me than I was able to offer. Then it occurred to me that what I really needed help with was repairing general collection materials, and that, coming in with no experience, what I thought Cyndy really needed to learn was good basic book repair, so I offered her an internship in basic book repair.

I was glad for the chance to lead a book repair internship because I think there is a need for good basic repair skills and it would give me the opportunity to lead an intern in doing a common treatment over and over again. I think this repetition is important.

As Cyndy mentioned in her report, I took note early that she was a quilter. I saw this as a good sign. Jolien had previous experience making jewelry. Both of them had plenty of experience consciously and concisely manipulating physical materials. I’ve taught classes to people who had virtually no crafting experience, and it sometimes showed with clumsy, klutzy work. Both interns showed a quick and natural ability to explore and understand the tools and materials they worked with.

Nothing helps me understand my craft like teaching it to someone else. One of my best learning experiences for me was after I had completed a repair technique that Cyndy had done several times she looked at my repaired book and asked “Why does yours look better than mine?” I’ve been repairing books for around 15 years, I should hope mine looks better than a novice, but understanding why it looks better means I need to go back and pay attention to the details of what I am doing. I repair books with my hands and my eyes; my brain’s involvement tends to be more subconscious. Being asked why my repairs are more successful meant I had to step back and understand and explain what it was I was doing, and then observe more closely what she was doing.

I think a key to the success of Cyndy’s training was repetition. She did a few techniques over and over again. This is the kind of important learning experience that can’t happen in workshops or university courses. The great thing about repetition in book repair is you eventually learn it’s not really repetition as you notice that every book presents nuanced differences from every other book you’ve worked on. One other thing repetition helps build is confidence. Both Jolien and Cyndy initially approached the items or techniques I ask them to carry-out with some trepidation – which is appropriate – but is also not conducive to good work. Repetition builds up confidence and with that the work flows better and is cleaner.

Jolien working on paper mending.

Once the intern has developed some skill and confidence I’ll naturally give them more freedom in making decisions and carrying out treatments. I am quite content to stand back and watch an intern struggle and even fail (I’ll not let irreparable harm come to our materials but I may let them do something which I must later undo.) My reason for doing this is not because I’m cruel, but because I know that struggling and failure can teach much more than if I were to quickly swoop in and show them the correct way to do it.

Similarly, upon completion of many of her repairs, I would ask Cyndy to look over her work and tell me what she thinks worked about the repair, what didn’t, and what she might do differently next time.

With both internships, the times working together were often filled with discussion about the broader preservation world talking about such things as preferred vendors, professional organizations, interesting people, books, and other resources, and other library and non-library topics. While I’ve been fortunate to have very engaging interns who have been wonderful to visit with, I also see this banter as helping the intern become aware of how the work they are doing now fits into the larger library preservation world.

I certainly hope to have more interns in the future, and I encourage others to be open to take on an intern. It can be a truly rewarding experience for all involved.

On being a professional

2011-09-24T17:04:00.000-05:00

I made one of the most challenging decisions of my professional career this week.

I was contacted by a nice library director at a nice university in a nice town and she personally invited me to apply for a very nice position. The position would be the perfect next step in my professional career. It is a position for which I am experienced enough to qualify for, but which offers enough new challenges to keep the work engaging. It is a small, but established preservation program.

After much consideration and hand wringing I said no.

The time spent pondering the decision, and the subsequent time spent second-guessing myself has led me to ponder my relationship to the library preservation profession and to the idea of being a professional. The whole work/life thing can be a difficult balancing act and there are parts of my non-work life that I highly value. My primary reasons for saying no to considering the position were economic (the prospect of trying to sell a home in a dismal housing market) and location (moving even further away from family and other associations that I value.) But I do sometimes regret that I am not more actively part of my profession and it seems like getting into an established preservation program in the academic world would have been a good step deeper into my profession.

I don’t mean to imply that in my current situation I and my employer are in the backwaters. But the facts are I work at a government, not academic library which leaves me out of some of those networks, the library had no conservation program before me, my conservation responsibilities account for less than 50% of my position description, and my employer provides very little in the way of professional support (this is mostly a budget and bureaucracy-caused situation and the library administration is increasing their effort to support whatever professional development they can.)

I’m not sure exactly what I think being a professional in the library preservation world looks like. And I know that I’m not alone in struggling with balancing the values of work and life. But I know that saying no to opportunities like this position hinders

To compensate for saying no to one professional opportunity, I decided I needed to say yes to some other professional activity, so I decided the least I could do is join and participate in a professional organization. So I joined ALA/ALCTS/PARS and committed myself to at least attend the next ALA conference. Paying dues to an organization and attending their conference is perhaps not the most creative or proactive way to participate in a profession, but it’s a start. I’ve had few opportunities to spend much time with others in the profession, and I’m really looking forward to the chance to buy Beth Doyle lunch. (Because that’s what professionals do, right?)

Book Repair Internship Report

2011-09-19T18:58:00.000-05:00

I had the great pleasure of having Cyndy as a book repair intern this summer. She has now provided me with the following report of her internship which, with her permission, I am sharing. The aspect of the internship and her report that I particularly appreciate is how keenly focused it is on developing skills in good basic book repair. I enjoyed this experience of spending an extended amount of time working with someone to develop foundational skills. I hope to write my reflections on this internship shortly.

Library of Michigan, Conservation Department Internship
June 1, 2011 – August 26, 2011
Intern: Cynthia Carollo
Supervisor: Kevin Driedger

Introduction & Background
This is a report on the internship I completed at the Library of Michigan during the 2011 summer semester (June – August), under the supervision of Kevin Driedger, Librarian & Conservator. The internship came about after an inquiry I made of Kevin during the Spring 2011 semester while taking a course at Clarion University titled LS 588 Preservation & Conservation of Library Materials. During my research for this course, I developed an interest in the techniques used to repair and preserve books and other library materials and decided that I wanted to do more independent research in this area of librarianship.

I visited the Library of Michigan and toured the facility with Kevin, including a visit to his work area, where I was able to see first hand the type of work done by a conservator. After this visit, I wrote to Kevin for an internship and after a few pleading emails, Kevin relented and agreed to take me on as an intern for the summer. I suspect my background in crafts and quilting may have been an influencing factor.

My experience with Kevin at the Library of Michigan not only exposed me to the tools and methods used to repair and restore library materials but I also learned a great deal about the decision making process when determining what techniques to use and when a repair might not be the best choice for a certain item.

This internship lasted long enough to allow me to learn and practice my skills with enough repetition that I feel fairly confident in my ability to do even complex repairs or restorations. In addition to the repairs in which I actually participated, I was also able to observe Kevin making repairs to rare materials using Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste, creating pamphlet folders, sewing plat books into protective covers, and doing some creative repairs to very old and extensively damaged books.

Tools & Materials
After an initial tour of the library and introductions to all of the library staff, we began with an introduction to book repair. Kevin introduced me to the tools I would use for my work and we talked about how each of the tools were used and for what jobs. I was provided with a toolbox that contained many items that I was already familiar with through my use of them in crafts such as card making, quilting, and sewing.

The following is a list of the items in my toolbox and at my workspace:
Bone folder, Small & large scissors, Small spatula, Tweezers, Craft knife, Knitting needle, Various size paint brushes, Container for water, Glass container of PVA Adhesive w/lid, , “Pink Ties,” Metal Ruler Paper, binder clips, Erasers, Sand paper, Pencil, Self healing cutting mat.

Tools I borrowed from Kevin’s tool collection:
Large spatula, rotary cutter, measuring tape, Ace bandage, sewing thread – linen, sewing needles, tacking iron, scalpel, water pen

Additional Tools & Equipment:
Scrap paper, wax paper, blotter paper, Reemay (spun polyester release cloth), presses, large paper cutter, large clamp, Formica covered boards, weights, glass work surface.

General Supplies:
Pre-cut end sheets, starched fabric on a roll, document repair tape, starched or paper backed fabric, various weights of paper for spine liners, Japanese papers of various weights and colors, PVA (polyvinyl acetate), methyl cellulose, and wheat starch paste.

With each repair I worked on, and eventually did myself, I learned how to use these tools, the equipment, and the supplies appropriately, although not without a bit of fumbling at first. It helped to have Kevin demonstrate how he accomplished a certain type of repair or used a specific tool, however, the most helpful method of learning came from watching Kevin use the tools and techniques in the course of his own work. Repeated observation coupled with demonstration and my own attempt to apply the techniques seemed to be the most effective method of learning.

The Decision Making Process
The library items that made their way to the work area for repair were selected by other librarians who had the responsibility for those collections. Sometimes the books or other materials would come with a note requesting the type of repair. It was obvious that the some of the librarians leaving notes did not fully understand the repair process. An example might be a note to reattach a spine, when the book was falling out of the case and the signatures (oh yes, I learned terminology….) were literally dangling by a thread.
Making a decision about what to do with a book or other items that arrived at the repair table required knowing which collection the item belonged to. The collections at the Library of Michigan include general materials (fiction and nonfiction), Federal Documents, the Rare Collection, the Michigan Collection including books by Michigan authors or books about Michigan, the Genealogy Collections, and the Law Collection. There are also many maps, newspapers, and microfiche collections.

An item from the Rare Collection is always repaired using the most detailed and advanced techniques because these materials are considered intrinsically valuable and have historic and often informational value as well. The Federal Documents must be maintained in a usable condition because The Library of Michigan is a Federal Documents Depository. The Michigan Collection is an important and central collection at the library because this is the state library. The Genealogy Collection is a high usage collection and must be available to researchers. The Law Collection is important for the Legislative and government employees throughout the state of Michigan as well as being a legal resource for the public.

Once the item’s collection is identified, other factors must be considered. One question to ask is how much is the item used or how much will it be used in the future. A high usage item may need to be replaced or repaired in such a way that it can tolerate repeated and frequent handling. Another question to ask is what is the current condition and how long will take to repair the item. In some cases the book is damaged beyond the point of being repaired and a box or envelop must be constructed to hold what is remaining of the book. At times, the pages of the text block are so brittle, that a repair might not be successful and again an enclosure might be used to hold the book. In another case, if the book has intrinsic value to the library, but the usage is estimated to be limited and the repair would be extensive, an enclosure might be constructed to hold the book as this takes less time, will protect the book from further damage, and will hold it’s contents together. Some books are appropriate for a full repair that might include separating the text block, recovering the boards and creating an entire new case for the book, then reconstructing the entire book with a reinforced spine, new fabric, end sheets, and case complete with headbands. This process can be time consuming but it insures a much more stable and usable book as a result.

The Repair Assessment
Once the background information on the book is determined, it is time to decide what repair is most appropriate. It is important to get a good sense of the status of the whole book before making a final decision on the repair technique. This means opening the book and examining it for loose pages or whole signatures being loose, separation of the text block from the boards, tears of the outer spine material, tears or brittleness of the internal spine materials, and so on. The assessment process is a very important part of the repair.

One of the things that became clear during my internship was that short cuts are not usually recommended. It is often better and takes less time to take the whole book apart for a full repair that to try to piece it back together with patches and adhesives. The trick is to learn which repairs will be good enough with a little patching and which need the full treatment.

The Repair Process
Throughout my internship, I was given progressively more difficult and complex repairs as well as progressively more independence in choosing the technique and proceeding with the repair.

I started with deconstruction of materials under Kevin’s direct supervision. My first task was the deconstruction of a tightly bound set of federal documents that had been bound into a hard cover case. This was a somewhat tedious task but it provided a good lesson in how a book is constructed and I was able to identify the different parts of the book and the methods that were used to bind these pamphlets into a hardbound volume.

During the remainder of my internship, I did various book repairs that included the following:
1. Deconstruction of hard bound books
a. Removing the text block from the case
b. Scraping spine of old paper and fabric
c. Removing end sheets (paste down & fly leaf), and often the initial and end pages.
d. Scraping the remnants of the paste downs from front & back cover.
e. Separating/cutting the spine from boards if necessary
f. Removing spine lining
g. Preparation of the boards if the new spine fabric was to be placed under the cloth or paper cover.
h. Removal of dust jackets
i. Cutting apart the sewing between signatures.

2. Reconstruction of books
a. Applying new end sheets to create a paste down and fly leaf
b. Tipping in pages at the ends of the text block and a few internal pages.
c. Reinforcing and reshaping the spine of a book with a layer or two of PVA
d. Applying new fabric to the spine and if appropriate, paper on top of that for strength and stability of the text block.
e. Adhering new spine liners to existing spines or creating whole new cloth or paper spines
f. Attaching spines to the board under the existing fabric or over if there were no designs on the covers to preserve.
g. Using knitting needles to glue the paste down back onto the board in a simple repair that did not require the removal of the boards.
h. Application of Japanese paper on page tears
i. Construction of a hinge with Japanese paper for the attachment of end sheets
j. Use of Japanese paper in constructing a portion of a spine
k. Use of archival document repair tape
l. Application of heat sensitive tissue
m. Sewing signatures together to reconstructed a text block
n. Tattered corner repair with small boards, wax paper, and binder clips.

3. Additional repairs
a. Construction of a Phase box.
b. Construction of a Clam Shell box.

Summary and Conclusion
I am in complete agreement with Kevin regarding the ability to learn book repair at a one-day workshop. Single repair techniques could be taught and used by the attendees, but serious book repair, particularly the removal of the text block from the case and then reconstruction is a skill that takes repeated practice. Courses designed to concentrate on one skill such as creating a Phase box or a Clamshell box might make a good one-day class. Repairs of page tears, tipping in pages, tattered corner repairs, and the knitting needle repair would also make a good one-day class, as these are repairs appropriate to public or school libraries. Any class that involved the removal of an entire text block and reconstruction would be much more appropriate for a multiple day class as even the drying time between the steps needs to be included and doing this process multiple times is the only way to get the actual “feel” for how to manipulate the tools and the book itself.

My internship at the Library of Michigan did help me get the “feel” of library conservation and preservation. The experience gave me an inspiring glimpse into the whole process of book repair as well as understanding the decision making steps that go into the job of maintaining a collection of library materials.

There was much I was not able to see or participate in during such a short assignment but I think I was exposed to enough of the process that I could repair books in a public or academic library, especially small or partial repairs that would prolong the life of a book and avoid costly offsite repairs. When I find myself in a librarian position, I hope that I will be allowed to use these skills to maintain that library’s collection if even as a small part of my responsibilities.

As I have already said many times, I am extremely grateful to Kevin and the Library of Michigan for this wonderful experience and I hope that I may use my skills somewhere along the way in my career as a librarian or where ever the course of my life takes me in the future. I would also highly recommend Kevin Driedger, as many already have, as a great teacher, cook, and conversationalist.

Collaborating to Document a Community - a review

2011-09-17T08:25:00.000-05:00

Cultural Heritage Collaborations: A Manual for Community Documentation by Melissa Mannon. New Hampshire: ArchivesInfo Press, 2010.

The first response I had to reading this book is "I need to hang out with archivists more."

Because one can only be so connected, or perhaps because I chose not to overextend my social network connections, archivists and archives are not a huge part of my interweb/social experience. I have some archives connections but I have to admit my extra-library attention has been more in the direction of museums. Reading this book will help push me a little deeper into the archives world.

Two things which shape some of my interests and caused me to be drawn to this title include: my time of working with newspapers and understanding the role they play in documenting a local community; and my interest in more proactively responding to the question of what should we be preserving – understanding the more creative aspect of preservation, not just collecting what exists, but also creating that which you want to preserve.

(I am aware that lots of people/professions creative document their community, but I was/am interested in coming at it from the perspective of a collecting/preserving institution.)

The title Cultural Heritage Collaborators grabbed my attention. Collaboration across cultural heritage institutions is a great thing, who doesn't like collaboration, although the presence of that word also causes me to raise my guards just a little. Collaboration is a current organizational buzz-word. Putting the word "collaborator" in every other line of your IMLS grant will double the chance of it getting funded. (Fact not verified by any actual data.) I was also taken in by the Community Documentation part of the title because documentation does have a creative ring to it.

Part of what the “cultural heritage collaborators” and “community documentation” also triggered in me is the idea of distributed authority. Collaborators and community imply that the authority to collect, preserve, and interpret the cultural heritage is not the property of the single official voice, but is distributed among a community of collaborators. (Perhaps I’m reading too much into the title.)

I ordered the book on Aug. 12, it was printed on the 14th.

The one other thing I'll say about the book before actually cracking the cover (train a book so the cover doesn’t crack) is that it is self-published. I mention this because for me, knowing this shaped my expectations of the book. I've seen a lot of self-published books and most of the times I can tell why their self-published - no commercial entity trying to make a buck would publish them. My experience of these self-published books has been: highly idiosyncratic, poorly written, and I get the distinct impression the author is quite pleased with him/herself. (This is the exact same response I get from reading my blog.) With that baggage, I must say I was gently surprised by the book. It does have its quirks, like erratic capitalization of the word archives, some missing text (p. 17), no hyphenation which results in a ragged right edge, and I thought it could have just used a little tightening up (but I think that of pretty much anything longer than a haiku.) That said, I've read many books published by large publishers that suffered worse editorial problems so I'd say this is one of the better examples of self-published work I've seen.

I've been putting off commenting on the substance of the book not because I didn't like the substance, but because the book is, as the title tells us, a manual. It tells the reader how to do things. Books of lofty (and not so lofty) ideas and theories are much easier for me to ponder and discuss. With a manual, it takes much more creative work to tease out any underlying concepts and theories. And, this book is a manual for archives - a discipline about which I know only enough to make myself look a fool. The first half of the book is about collaborative community documentation, while the second half is very much an introduction/manual for archives. I'll leave the second half alone and concentrate the rest of my energy on the first.

Mannon writes of the purpose of this collaboration for community documentation "By connecting cultural organizations to the heart of a community's pulse and character, we can attain a stronger awareness of our vitality and how we can benefit diverse members of society." (p. 2) She repeatedly expresses the need to document multiple historical perspectives.

"This book encourages institutions to incorporate a community documentation strategy. Such a strategy allows local repositories to find a collecting niche in their community, in a non-competitive fashion, to actively seek records related to their mission, and to work with other repositories to create a collecting network that seeks to be all-inclusive, focused, and accessible." (p. 8)

Mannon writes largely out of the experience of the local historical society which brings with it the blessing/challenge of the interested non-professional. She recognizes that professional, quasi-professional, nonprofessional cultural heritage collaborators must forge honest partnerships to attain success.

In the book Mannon equates documents with "physical culture" with no mention of the place of digital documentation. Admittedly, small repositories have a hard enough time maintaining physical collections that to introduce digital collections may be too overwhelming, but the digital culture exists, and is ignored at our peril.

One impression, correct or not, I have of the archival profession is that some of their concepts are, well, the word I like to use is quaint. Thing like the doctrine of preserving original order to preserve the "original intent" of the creator seems so 19^th century. And so I find the traditional archivist stance of very detached collector who dares not impose their own subjective order on someone else's papers seems to conflict with the idea of archivists as active documenter of communities. Mannon recognizes this challenge between the active and passive roles - as reflected through her quote of Mark A Green "Archivists have to understand, accept, and work within the reality that we -- through our selection -- through our marketing -- do as much to create the documentation of the past as the individuals and organizations that generated the records in the first place." (p.28)

"To develop valuable collections that do not leave gaps in the documentary record, an archivist must be an active participant in collecting resources that are interpretive of society rather than just a possive collector of any documents that come his [or her] way." (p.41)

And to belabor my archivist stereotype a little more, one of the author’s point under "Why value archives?" "To provide primary information about societies activities to help citizenry and scholars recognize and evaluate these events for themselves, so that they may discern truth and reality from fiction and biases." (p. 32)I guess I'm just too jadedly post-modern or relativistic but I have a hard time with the language of "so they may discern truth and reality" as an academically honest endeavor. Language that would feel more comfortable to me is "so they may draft new narratives." I'd even accept (maybe) "so they may draft more authentic narratives." (I realize I am once again getting pretty far from the alleged topic of this blog.)

To get back to practical matters and the actual subject of the book, I noticed on the pages frequent reference to "determined" and "perseverance" as a necessity to make these kinds of collaborations successful. I think this is an important recognition of how collaborations often work. While a collaboration may involve many parties it is usually the determination and perseverance of a few individuals that keep the whole thing moving forward.

I’m glad I read this book and I think it is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in preserving the cultural heritage of a community. (While Mannon seemed to primarily used community as referring to a geographical place, it is easily extended to all other forms of community.) For the non-archivist, it is a good introduction to seeing the world through an archivist’s eyes. It is filled with good practical advice built on the author’s experience doing the very things she is writing about. Now I think I’ll go online and find a few more archivist tweeters to follow. (I already follow the author!)

A Conservator Takes on Digitization

2011-08-29T18:20:00.000-05:00

In 2004 University of Kansas conservator Whitney Baker wrote in Library Resources and Technical Services about the hybrid conservator. The article discussed emerging preservation programs which only hired one professional, a hybrid conservator, who was responsible for conservation of both general and special collection materials. The paper's survey and following discussion covered how individuals address the “split personality” of these positions.

This was published right around the time when I finished my MLIS and the library where I worked (and continue to work) "tapped me on the shoulder" to take on a librarian position with half time responsibility for conservation. They had a book mender on staff, but never someone with the training and skills (meager as they were/are). So, on a meager budget and some thrifty salvaging of some unused equipment I set up a small but functional shop and made an effort to care for the library's more "special" collections.

Recently, due to budget cuts the Library did some re-visioning and refocusing of our mission. During this process digitization was identified as a priority. At the beginning of the new year library staff and our responsibilities were shuffled to put us more in line with our new focus. We each received a sheet of paper with every staff-person’s name and area(s) of responsibility. Behind my name, after cataloging and conservation the word "digitization" appeared. (Oh, and the book mender retired so I got to repair the general collections as well.)

The intent of this post isn’t for me to brag (or bemoan) about how many tasks I can do and still manage to Facebook, Tweet, and write the occasional blog post. Rather, as I’m spending more time thinking things digitization, I’m pondering how they relate to the other aspects of my library work.

It is not uncommon for conservation and digitization to be affiliated in the library setting, although it’s not necessarily an obvious connection. One is very old world, one is very 21st century. One is seen as all about physical materials, and one is seen as “virtual,” as non-material.

My guess is that some of the perceived connections seen between conservation and digitization include: 1) both often deal with old items; 2) both are seen as related to preservation.

Conservation and Digitization Workflow

One of the ways I’ve been thinking of these two areas is in terms of workflow – what are the stages these programs move through. I’ve very roughly laid it out in terms of: Selection, Action, Sustaining. (I realy wanted the third word to end in –tion , but one didn’t come to me.)

Selection - what to conserve/digitize? This question is often answered by someone other than the person doing the conserving/digitizing. I guess a bigger question is for what purpose or to what end should this item/collection be conserved/digitized? Both acts are about providing ongoing access, although neither act by themselves assures ongoing access.

Action - Both digitization and conservation involve intimate and extensive interaction with the object. While there are commonalities to library materials, each piece will also dictate how it should be treated. Obviously the two tracks require very different technical knowledge. Also, the goal of digitization is to create a separate new thing and therefore requires decisions about the disposition of the original.

Sustaining - With both conservation and digitization, the intervention is only the start of the story. If the final object is not placed in a sustaining and sustainable environment all the work may be of little value. If the final object does not have good descriptive data to assist people in locating it the work may be of little value. If people cannot readily and easily access the final object, the work may be of little value.

There is a baffling relationship between digitization and the status of the object digitized. In some instances, it is thought that digitization of a book helps preserve the book because it reduces the need to physically use the original item. On the other side, volumes are often damaged intentionally or not in the process of digitization. (By intentional damage I'm thinking guillotining the spine.) Some suggest digital preservation is more sustainable than print preservation. Others disagree. The presence of a digitized volume in a trusted digital repository may impact the decisions of other libraries' regarding the disposition of their copy of that volume. Do they keep, send to offsite storage, or discard?

New Challenge

I now have the enjoyable challenge of creating a new digitization program. Yes, it means I get to buy and learn new technology and software, which is fun, but the part I'm more excited about, and what I think is the bigger challenge is devising a program that, on a minimal budget, can efficiently and effectively create useful and helpful new digital collections. As a state library with our primary responsibility being to serve legislative and state employee research needs and to be able to take advantage of the opportunities digital materials can offer.

Obviously, trying to design, oversee, and often enact effective and efficient conservation and digitization programs, not to mention cataloging and “other duties as assigned,” is well, ridiculous. But, it’s also quite a lot of fun. If a hybrid conservator is one who conserves general and special materials, I’m not sure what my current position is? Trinity? Quaternary? I’ll just stick with librarian.

(The first connection between my conservation and new digitization duties is the acquisition of a guillotine.)

Coming back to life

2011-08-25T17:38:00.000-05:00

It was a long hot summer. My desire to actively read and engage with all-things preservation wilted in the heat. And so I read a novel (or most of it). I enjoyed my growing funk and R&B music collection. I visited Athens, Ohio. Mostly I waited for the heat to go away.

But the nights are getting cooler, windows are staying open, bread-baking season is in starting up, and I'm ready to re-engage the larger preservation world.

My desire for this fall semester of blogging is to continue the format that shaped most of my previous blog entries. My hope is to actively engage some recent preservation-related books (allowing myself a good bit of flexibility in how closely the books are related to the preservation topic.)

I've covered most of what I had in my initial reading bibliography and may eventually get back to the few unread books I have left on that list. I have a few newer titles which were not on my initial list that I will be reading next. Two of the books are specifically about preservation, but I think both will help provide a broader context within which to understand preservation.

Cultural Heritage Collaborators: A Manual for Community Documentation, by Melissa Mannon. This 2010 publication come from and archives context. My interest in this title was particularly caught by the active "community documentation" concept.

The other title, which I need to thank the ever-resourceful Dan Cull for making me aware of is Letting Go: Sharing Historical Authority in a User Generated World. Published Sept. 2011 by Left Coast Press. This title comes from the museum context. As one who is keenly aware of the authority the professional preservation community can assume upon itself, the ideas within this title catch my interest and I'm eager to read the authors' thoughts.

On a completely different vein, I saw that a revised edition of Kenneth Lavendar's Book Repair is out and I'd be interested in giving that title a re-read.(It's been a long time since I've read through a book repair manual.)

I'd be curious to hear if there are other recent books or articles that people would suggest as a worthwhile read. You can suggest titles even if you have no idea if they are worthwhile. As you can see, I cast my net pretty wide.

Why We Write In Books

2011-08-10T19:05:00.000-05:00

I think this is a great video and reflection on our relationship with books. (I didn't start writing in books till well into my college years, and still won't write with anything other than pencil - I abhor highlighting.)

Writing in books from reesenews on Vimeo.
The video was created by Jonathan Michels of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Lazy summer

2011-07-25T19:06:00.000-05:00

I've realized that when summer began my interest in reading deep conservation books and writing seemingly deep conservation posts on this blog - well all that just melted away in the heat. It's not that I'm not interested, I just need a summer vacation.

In lieu of any meaty posts on my blog this summer, feel free to follow my work Facebook page - its more practical, pithy, and picture-filled than anything on this blog.

Feds and Funding and a PhD

2011-07-16T20:16:00.000-05:00

I pondered pursuing a PhD recently. I enjoy research, teaching, writing and I feel I bring a different perspective to the conversation. I did some research and talked with a couple mentor/colleagues. I eventually decided not to pursue the the degree primarily for two economic reasons: 1) trying to sell a home in this market, and 2) the limited employment opportunities for library PhDs with a preservation concentration.

In my thinking about this PhD idea I had narrowed down where I wanted to do my studies. (The school’s initials are S.C.) I also had an area of research that I would have liked to pursue. (I’m well aware that had I actually gone ahead with this PhD idea my research interest may well have changed multiple times during the course of my studies.)

The area that I was (and still am) interested in is looking at 20^th century U.S. federal funding for preservation – I’m thinking particularly of NEH and IMLS (and predecessors) – and looking at the kind of programs they developed and the kind of funding they provided and exploring what this funding reveals of their “theory of preservation.” How do these federal funding programs understand preservation? What do they see is preservation’s function? What are these programs ultimately trying to preserve? And then, how has federal funding for preservation, and the underlying “theory” behind it, how has that influenced or created a national theory of preservation?

I think these are interesting and important questions. We all, individually and corporately make decisions based on ideas, theories, and worldviews of which we very likely are not aware. I think it is important to look back at past decisions - such as what kind of preservation funding did the federal government provide - to decipher and decode what, if any, underlying beliefs and understandings for those decisions reveal.

I'm guessing my interest in federal funding for preservation is in part a product of the fact that in the course of my work I’ve had the good fortune of working both with the National Endowment for Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. I’ve worked for an NEH funded project, done grant reviewing for both NEH and IMLS, have attended NEH and IMLS sponsored events, and have been a partner in writing NEH and IMLS grants. (I’m still a little bitter about losing the IMLS grant.)

Speaking of IMLS, I’ve been quite impressed with these folks and their openness and interest in exploring different ways of engaging the larger community. They have been great at getting video of their Connecting to Collections and WebWise conferences posted online. They make available library related datasets on Data.gov (it would be great to see grant recipient data on this site.) And now, they are using the social media tool, Ideascale to solicit the public’s opinions and ideas as they create their next 5-year plan. This tool allows the participant to vote and comment on ideas, or submit their own ideas for others to vote/comment on.

Although I ended up deciding not to pursue PhD (for now?) my research and writing interests have not subsided. This blog is intended to help me meet some of those research and writing interests, but the problem with completely independent research/writing with no deadlines or people looking for results is it can so easily take a back seat to things like summer, yesterday’s Colbert Report, washing dishes, sitting on the porch swing, or taking a nap. Oh well.

Enthusiasm and Attention

2011-07-04T07:59:00.000-05:00

One thing I miss from my days of teaching workshops, and for the Wayne State LIS program is the enthusiasm of the student. I would witness genuine thrill and fascination with handling a 200 year old book, handling and learning about different kinds of leather, and learning even the most basic of book repair techniques. It sometimes felt like they had been sitting on the other side of a closed gate waiting eagerly to get in to this fascinating and mysterious new garden. And I was the grounds keeper who opened the gate, let them in, and showed them around.

I was reminded of that enthusiasm this morning as I discovered a new-to-me blog Binding Obsession created by a student a Simmons College. (She initially followed my twitter feed, and I then followed her feed and saw the link to her blog, which I added to my blog reader - isn't social media grand!) Her detailed descriptions and images of learning paper and book repair techniques are excellent and reveal a deep enthusiasm for the topic. Keep up the good work Jackie.

While I'm not teaching in a classroom/workshop setting, I am privileged to be working with an intern again this year, and once again I can witness the enthusiasm. Yet, it is not just her enthusiasm which affects me, but as she is learning book repair she must pay very conscious attention to details that I may not even think about any more. It is a wonderful experience to teach a technique and do a step that causes me to step back and consciously understand and explain why I do that step and what it achieves. Looking at book repair through they eyes of an enthusiastic novice helps me step out of my routines and pay greater attention to what I do, and sometimes a little enthusiasm rubs off on me as well.

Question Authority

2011-06-26T13:53:00.000-05:00

“The Utility of Discourse Analysis to Heritage Studies: The Burra Charter and Social Inclusion” by Emma Waterton, Laurajane Smith & Gary Campbell. International Journal of Heritage Studies v.12, no. 4, July 2006, pp. 339-355.

In my late teens and early twenties I, like many others, had an assortment of “Question Authority” paraphernalia - postcards, bumper stickers. I was just another well-educated, suburban, middle-class,white male who was sure “the system” with it’s conservative thinking and oppressive whatever needed to be taken down. Now that I’m middle aged I don’t think my ideas have changed all that much but now, rather than spending all my time brooding in my parent’s basement I find myself fixing plumbing problems and watching South Park reruns and don’t really have the energy and enthusiasm to fight the system.

I do, however, think the “Question Authority” line has as much relevance now as it did then, except now I have to acknowledge that I - and I’m going to guess that you too Mr./Ms blog reader - that I am the authority. Being a well-educated, suburban, middle-class,white male means you are part of the authority. Questioning authority is all well and good when authority is some thing out there - but it is so much more important, and challenging, when authority is you.

Questioning one’s own authority requires a deep level of self-awareness and detachment. It requires stepping outside of one’s own world-view to acknowledge that there are other legitimate world-views and, more importantly, questioning your own authority requires the ability to detach from your world-view in order to critically observe and analyze it.

And yes, this curious introduction to a blog post will wend its way to the topic of conversation.

How does the language we use about conservation, and related topics like heritage, reflect our deeper and often unspoken beliefs and agenda?

The authors of “The Utility of Discourse Analysis to Heritage Studies: The Burra Charter and Social Inclusion” investigate the idea of “heritage” particularly as it it used in The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance. To achieve this investigation, they use the technique of discourse analysis.

As I am not a student of discourse analysis, and not particularly skilled in any form of literary analysis I cannot provide an expert’s critique of what the authors are attempting to accomplish. I am, however, intrigued by what they have to say and will briefly report it here.

The authors look at the use of the idea of heritage and state that the literature presents no clear sense of what that word actually means. With this vagueness comes “the prevalence of an uncritical, common-sense understandings of what heritage entails. Smith refers to this as the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) which, she argues, promotes a consensus approach to history, smoothing over conflict and social differences. This representation, which incorporates a set of conservative, if not reactionary, and distinctly Western, social meanings, has become ubiquitous in the public’s understanding of heritage.” (pp. 339-340) (The authors are citing Smith’s Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage.)

They continue “Smith points out, any attempts at engaging with community, or stakeholder groups must take into account the power relations that underlie the dominant heritage discourse, as they may inadvertently work to discourage the equitable participation of these groups whose understanding of the nature of heritage are excluded from that discourse.” (p. 340)

To paraphrase the previous quote: In order to authentically engage with a larger community in discussion of heritage, you must be aware of, and questioning of your own authority, and especially the language you use to express that authority in that conversation.

I pull out the following three quotes not because I think they speak specifically or solely about the Burra Charter, but because I think they speak about much of western conservation literature.

“The distinctive styling of semantics works to construct objective, factual, and thus seemingly natural account of the conservation process, when it is in reality privileging a particular perspective.” (p. 347)

“Perhaps more importantly, the idea that conservation values of experts might be just another set of cultural values is entirely absent in the discursive construction of this text, and for that matter all texts of this sort.” (p. 349)

“In our view, community participation must hing on the concept of negotiation, not only over conservation and heritage values but also over the very meaning and nature of heritage, so the conservation ethic itself is open to renegotiation and redefinition.” (p. 351)

Authority does not have to be questioned because authority is always wrong, but authority should be questioned in order to bring to light our unspoken beliefs, and to enter into a more authentic dialogue with all interested parties on questions of heritage and preservation.

Preservation for the people

2011-06-12T06:33:00.000-05:00

In corresponding with a colleague recently I was reminded of this image/slogan which was a constant presence on my earlier blog but had not made its way onto this blog. I continue to be quite pleased-with-myself over this image and it continues to capture at least some of the spirit I try to bring to my work and writing. I still have the one, and only, t-shirt with this emblazoned on the front.

(And just to clarify for people who may not be familiar - the fist is holding a bone-folder - a tool commonly used by bookbinders/conservators.)

Palin emails and digital preservation

2011-06-11T08:19:00.000-05:00

(This post has nothing to do with Sarah Palin as a politician, or celebrity, or anything closely resembling politics.)

Photo by Brian Wallace/Associated Press

Copies of something like 24,000 pages of emails sent to and from then Alaska Governor Sarah Palin were released this week. I took interest in the fact that they were released in the form of thousands of pieces of paper. Upon receiving the paper news organizations began a frantic project of scanning and crowd-sourced researching the emails. While on first observation this migration of the emails from electronic to paper may seem odd, wasteful, and somewhat anachronistic (why didn't they just give the news organizations the electronic files?) I think it reflects some deeper preservation challenges.

Virtually all modern information today begins its life digitally. Whether that information is an email, tomorrow's Washington Post, or the next Stephen King novel. This digital information may then be reformatted into another format like print. The print version can then also be reformatted into things like microfilm. (This digital beginning and ease of format migration makes it more challenging to decide which is the original/authentic version.) Each of these formats can be preserved but each of these formats present their own preservation challenges.

With preserving emails, unless you've got the skills and services in place to ensure long-term digital preservation, then printing and storing in a good environment is probably the most effective technique. I know that state governments are rapidly building up their digital preservation capabilities, but sometimes putting something on paper is just the safest way to go. And we are seeing how quickly this print collection can be scanned back into digital form.

I'd be curious to know the State of Alaska was archiving Palin's emails in paper format, or if they preserve them digitally and printed them for dissemination.

Some rambling thoughts about library/book conservation education

2011-06-04T19:52:00.000-05:00

At the AIC meeting this past week there was a session about the 3 new library conservation education programs. The event has been well covered on the internets by the tweeting of @queensuzy and @fletcherdurant, and the blogging of Beth on PCAN and Jeff Peachey on the AIC's Conservators Converse. What follows is a bit of a ramble, a bit of a rant, and a bit of a response. (I had initially planned to write this as a response on the Conservators Converse blog, but as my response grew, I grew uncomfortable about inflicting my words on some other organization's blog. So I post them here, but be sure to read what everyone else wrote. I will also note that one of the joys/dangers of writing for one's own blog is the freedom I have in approaching editing and rewriting. I usually write my posts, and then edit and rewrite not until I think the post is done, but until I go "Oh hell, I'm tired of this." Nothing I post on this blog is ready for publication. )

I noticed when I read Jeff's report that when he wrote about the training of "book conservators" my immediate response was "No, library conservators." Not a criticism - not a big point - just an observation of my response. I guess the library thing is pretty important to me.

I suppose that a reason we are so concerned about training future library/book conservators is because ensuring a healthy future for our profession validates what we are doing today. Few things would make us feel more lousy about our profession than if the library & conservation world decided they didn't need conservators - that our profession was no longer needed. So, a robust training program assures ourselves, correctly or not, that we and our work are still valued.

I'd really be curious to know how much "market research" went into designing these programs. I don't mean to imply that I don't think they did any (well, maybe I do mean to imply that) but I would be curious to know how they assessed the need that these programs are designed to fill, and what kind of future needs do they project.

I was curious to read the comment from Judy Walsh of the Buffalo State program that these “training programs are a learners permit." Is this point made explicitly clear to those looking to enter the program? "Okay, for 3 years you will pay us lots of money and spend lots of energy and you will receive a degree that, by itself, many institutions won't consider sufficient to hire you." (There's also a bit of cruel irony in Mellon funding the training of entry-level conservators but the employment opportunities they fund are only for advanced-level conservators.)

I remain less concerned about the training of conservators, then I am of preservation administrators. This is not because I think PAs are more valuable than conservators, I just think a PA's value is less recognized. As library collections and their management becomes more complex and diverse libraries need people who have a general sense of the whole of library collections. (I fully acknowledge that my assessment for libraries' need for preservation administrators is based on absolutely no research of the market's perception of their need for preservation administrators. It actually seems that the market doesn't perceive much of a need for preservation administrators. Markets can be idiots!)

I guess its natural and to be expected that conservation programs would train conservators, and not preservation administrators. I am not aware hat the art/museum world has anything like a PA in their professional job descriptions.

Now for a bit of possibly unnecessary self-disclosure - which I think may help explain some of the source of my comments. I'm a D-list conservator. (Okay, maybe C-list, but D-list has a better pop-culture ring to it.) I write this as a pretty realistic assessment of my training and abilities within the library conservation world. I don't have an advanced conservation degree and I don't work in a recognized and respected library program, but I've trained with some good people and I've been working with books as physical objects in a library setting for about 15 years. I do pretty good work. I know what I can, and can't do, and work within my limits (most of the time.) I think there are a lot of D-list conservators out there and I think a lot of libraries rely on the work of D-list conservators (if they even use the conservator title) to care for their collections. Despite all the work of D-list conservators, and despite all the need for D-list conservators, there is no official/institutional structures/training to account for D-listers.

The 3 training programs appear to be aimed at creating a handful of B+ conservators trained to work on the "treasures" of the library - the rare and special collections materials, but can they do anything else?

What are libraries to do with their vast medium-rare, and less-than-rare collections? Do these programs train people to do ordinary tasks like 15 minute rebacks of common, modern hardcover books? (An incredibly useful skill to have in a library, if for nothing else than to train a newly hired book repair para-professional.) Do these programs instruct about such things as commercial library binding and microfilm - shudder - which remain useful preservation tools, but are completely outside the realm of the art conservation world in which they are embedded.

It would seem to me that especially as the libraries are looking at models of shared print repositories, and dealing with issues of mass digitization projects, and trying to understand the relationship of their physical collection to their digital collection, libraries will need people who can think smartly about the broader related preservation issues. Libraries will need these people, but will they find them?

Librarian/Conservator

2011-05-26T12:49:00.000-05:00

The words under my name on my forthcoming business cards will read "Librarian/Conservator". I don't know that my employer has ever supplied me with an official title, so when it was time to order business cards those were the words I chose for myself.

These words and their order reflect how I perceive myself in my work. I am a librarian and I am a conservator, but librarian comes before conservator. Or, I'm a librarian who conserves and not a conservator who works in a library. My work is first and foremost about the library - it is about helping the library fulfill its mission. This may explain why, though my hands (and my job description) are all about object conservation, my head is more and more about the broader issues of preservation. By its very nature preservation seems more institutionally focused than is conservation.

I'm sure this self-perception is in part due to the fact that I've worked in libraries longer than I've done conservation,. I've also worked (and continue to work) in a variety of areas within the library giving me an understanding/appreciation for the library as an institution with diverse functions and a broad mission.

I suspect that my library-first approach is also due to the fact that the objects I work on generally do not have the same degree of distinct value that museum/art objects do. The library object derives more of its value because it is part of a collection held within an institution. (The whole of the library is greater than the sum of its parts.)

While I am obviously interested in the issues and techniques of book conservation, I approach these issues and techniques through the lens of the library. I am not a member of AIC or ALA, but if I were to invest in membership and meeting attendance my first choice would be ALA. (My main motivation for attending either organization's meetings would be to meet people - an "in-the-flesh" Facebook experience.)

I'm not suggesting that my work "orientation" is the preferred orientation for everyone who does conservation in a library setting. Others in this field are stronger on conservation and they add a lot to the profession that I can't.

I do think it is important to understand and appreciate the larger institutional context of the items we work on, and the stuff I work on is in a library, and I am a librarian.

Internet Archive's Physical Archive

2011-05-17T17:10:00.000-05:00

I noted with interest that the famed archiver of the internet, and provider of free and open access to digitized materials (i.e. not Google), The Internet Archive, recently announced an open house for their new physical archive space.

They describe the place as

A high density, modular system for storing books, video and audio
A temp controlled environment for long-term preservation
Our new logistics facility that will catalog and coordinate large collections of books records and movies.

It will initially hold over 300,000 books, and they are "gearing up for millions."

They don't say what are the physical materials they will be holdings, and more importantly, why they have decided to build a physical collection. I'm assuming this is to hold materials they intend to keep for a long time, and not just things in the queue to be digitized. I will do a little more searching, but I do hope they explain further their understanding of the function of this collection. I am reminded, however, of Gary Frost and his ongoing defense of the role of physical collections in relation to their digital surrogate. "We confirm their back-up, mastering, and authentication roles in support of digital research." (From a recent post.)

The Same Ax, Twice

2011-05-17T04:51:00.000-05:00

The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age by Howard Mansfield.

After my adventure with Gumbrecht, Same Ax, Twice was a light summer read - a welcome change.

It is a book filled with stories about people and their relationship to the past, and especially the material stuff and places of the past. There are lots of well-told stories of re-enactors, and collectors, and restorers. They are stories of people living very intentionally in relationship to their sense of the past. They are stories of people attempting to capture and portray the fact and spirit of the past, from what does it take to be a true civil war re-enactor, to what kind constitutes a true reproduction of a Wright Brothers plane.

As a book filled with lots of narrative, it doesn't confront the reader with a lot of challenging data and concepts, but gradually builds its case. As the book nears its end the author reflects on the various stories told and their connecting themes of nostalgia, our sense of home and place, and our relationship to our physical environment.

Unlike most of the other books I've read for this blog, this book did not cause a flurry of note-taking, making for a more casual reading experience, but it is a thoughtful book.

I'll close this brief post with a quote from the last page of the book.

"Renewal. Ours is an age of broken connections, lost connections between heart and work, soul and politics, community and the self. Restoration is renewal -- an effort to mend the world -- or else it is not worth doing. Good restoration is a prayer, an offering. It's praise, attention paid; it revels in the glory and spirit of this life." (p. 276)

Preserving Digital News

2011-05-11T19:27:00.000-05:00

The Center for Research Libraries recently issued a report Preserving News in the Digital Environment: Mapping the Newspaper Industry in Transition.

There is also a webinar to discuss the issues of this report, however, as best I can tell, you have to be part of a CRL member institution to participate. I'm hoping that registering as a "self-appointed, honorary" member of some CRL member institution will work as well ;-)

I've also been watching the posted videos of the presentations at the Newspaper Archive Summit held Apr. 10-12 at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

I'd suggest there are two (but not only two) ways to approach the issue of preserving newspapers..

1) Preserve what newspapers/news providers produce as a record of what they produced.
2) Preserve documentation about local community, often best recorded in the local newspaper.

The CRC report is actually hardly about preservation at all - it is really about understanding the techniques for how digital news content is created, managed, and presented. My interest lies more in the area of what should we preserve, but I appreciate and think there is good value in developing a deep technical understanding of digital news content creation. It's comparable to hearing from people who have a deep understanding of medieval bookbinding. Or, as in the case of the recent Permanence Matters conference looking at the production and use of "permanent" paper. This technical knowledge of how items were created and how they must be preserved must be in conversation with the curatorial decisions of what to collect and preserve.

While the permanent paper approach is intended to actually influence the materials content producers use, I don't get the impression that the digital newspaper preservation crowd, at least as represented by this report, is intending to influence how newspaper publishers go about creating and providing access to their content. This report approaches preservation by starting at the source where the product to be preserved is produced. The goal is to understand how the content is created and published and how to use that knowledge to shape its preservation.

While the focus of the report is on the technical aspects, it also, if tangentially, addresses some of the questions of content. "Media convergence and consolidation in the news industry, however, is creating even more uniformity of practice today. As local newspapers are acquired by larger media groups, many production practices are being dictated by the home office." (p. 24) It is not just uniformity of practice, but, and I would argue more importantly, uniformity of content. Do you need to preserve all the mid-market Gannett papers when so much of their content, editorial approach, and formatting is identical?

I think it is important to step back a little and ask ourselves what it is that newspapers provide, and is its value worth preserving. And, how has what newspapers provide changed over their long history. American newspapers of 50, 100, and 150 are quite different creatures.

"The newer model of the news Web, however, is exemplified by seattlepi.com, the Hearst Seattle Media’s “flagship site.” Like the Wisconsin State Journal site, seattlepi.com also focuses heavily on information of local interest, such as crime, regional politics, and local sports teams. But seattlepi.com is even more fundamentally different from its now defunct predecessor, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. It features not only original staff reporting and breaking news, but blogs by staff and readers, links to other journalism and news Web sites, community databases, and photo galleries. Through partnerships with other Seattle media (i.e., radio and television broadcasters), seattlepi.com also has access to video and audio produced by their local staff." (pp. 52-53)

I think the quote above demonstrates one of the promising things I developing in newspaper's websites - and this impression is based on very little research. It seems hat what newspaper websites have more of than their print counterpart is local information. As the report about the Seattle site listed, this local information is gathered from a variety of sources, staff, readers, other sources in the creation of a community information center. If newspapers publishers and libraries were smart they would talk to each other and work together - using that whole "synergy" thing - as they both have things to offer and benefit from such a community information center.

"Their websites function as regional portals to a much larger and more dynamic realm of text, image, and multimedia information, combining with the content produced in their local newsrooms content and applications produced by third-parties and even by consumers themselves. The presence of this content dramatically changes the nature and impact of the news reported and the experience of the user." (p. 53)

One thing I did not read about in this report is the issue of context. Issue and page layout creates a visual/informational context for the news story. In the U.S. Newspaper Project and more currently in the National Digital Newspaper Project the newspaper page is considered important as a provider of context. What does the idea of context mean in the digital realm. The visual context of digital news is fugitive, at best. As newspaper content is more segmented/detachable, the page and its layout is decreasing in importance. How will this decontextualization of new articles affect preservation?

I'm glad to have the opportunity to listen in to these conversations that about the changing shape of news production and preservation, and I'm encouraged by how many people are interested and involved in these discussions.

Redesigning Your Library, Protecting Your Library event in Michigan

2011-05-10T18:38:00.000-05:00

Mideastern Michigan Library Cooperative
and
Mott Community College Library

Invite you to attend:

Redesigning Your Library….
and Protecting Your Library

Guest Speakers:
Amy Fugate, Vice President Academic Affairs - Mott Community College
Larry Koehler, Executive Director/Architect - Physical Plant - Mott Community College
Alyce Riemenschneider, Principal/Senior Designer - Riemenschneider Designs
Amanda Krok, Planning And Commissioning Coordinator – Phys. Plant - Mott Community College
Kathy Irwin, Library Director - Mott Community College
Shannon Zachary, Head, Preservation and Conservation - University of Michigan
Ed Burns, Interim Director - Ferndale Public Library (Water)
Cledos Powell, Assistant Director for Facilities - Detroit Public Library (Fire)
Kate Pohjola, Director - Lapeer District Library (Mold)

This informative workshop will provide you with the ins and outs of library redesign and guide you through the planning needed to protect your investment through disaster recovery planning. Tours of the newly renovated Mott College Library will be available.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011, 9:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Mott Community College Library
1401 E. Court Street, Flint, MI 48503
3rd Floor Center for Teaching & Learning Room

$40.00 MMLC Members
$50.00 Non-MMLC Members
(includes a boxed lunch)

.5 CEU’s available
Reservations now being accepted at Mideastern Michigan Library Cooperative.
To register, phone (810) 232-7119; fax (810) 232-6639 or email bancroft@gfn.org

Inherent Vice

2011-05-01T08:24:00.000-05:00

I'm reading "The Same Ax, Twice" and this little thought came to me during my reading.

"Inherent vice." I've heard and used that expression so often for things like the problems of wood pulp paper - the lignin, the acid, etc. But now, upon reading that phrase, it occurred to me - we are declaring what is naturally appropriate to an object as a vice?

Vices are bad things - things that should be stopped (or done, but with a guilty conscience knowing that you really shouldn't.) The inherent vices of materials, as I understand them, are those things within the materials that cause their own decay.

Is a flower loosing its petals the "inherent vice" of the flower? Is becoming a teenager an "inherent vice" of being a child?

Woodpulp paper decays quickly, because that is the natural life of its chemical and physical construction. Is that bad? I guess it seems bad if we are wanting to keep the woodpulp paper in good condition for a long period of time, but the problem seems to be our high desires or expectations for a material that has no business meeting those high desires and expectations. And because it won't do what we want, we say it is riddled with vice - it must be bad and we must try to reform it.

The language of "inherent vice" seems to have a demonizing-the-enemy quality to it. If we use enough bad language about it, the funders will give us money to fight it. Maybe we should create a new conservation category - "evildoers." "Lignin is an evildoer. It must be eradicated and the cellulose must be liberated." That would get the NEH's attention.

This little reflection is not to imply that I think we should give up on trying to preserving things that are hard to preserve, but just a though about our use of the language of "inherent vice." That said, I'm thinking about adding a sign in my shop that reads "Vice Squad."

“Old family bible”

2011-04-29T16:08:00.000-05:00

As I tweeted earlier today, 3 of the most challenging words for this book conservator to hear are “old family bible”. It’s not that I don’t like to hear them, although the truth is I probably don’t, but I find it a challenge to adequately respond to those words.

When people ask what I do and if I feel the need to go beyond “I’m a librarian” I usually add a line about conservation, or fixing old books and maps, or something like that, because I know that usually engages or impresses people. (I seldom reply that I catalog and archive electronic government documents, or manage interlibrary loan – both of which are true, or were, but mentioning them also tends to elicit blank stares.)

The challenge/opportunity when people start knowing you as the book repair guy, is they start telling you about, or bringing to you, their books. (It seems everyone has books, and nearly everyone has old books.) It’s not uncommon for my work phone to ring with one of my colleagues on the other end saying, “There is someone here at the reference desk, or on the line, who would like to talk to you.” I agree, because I’m a nice guy, and then the next sentence I hear begins “I have this…” which I complete in my head, with a groan, “old family bible.” I guess I’m right 75% of the time.

The “old family bible” may be the most ubiquitous object in the United States. Most of the ones I encounter are the late 19th century behemoths. They are large, they are elaborately decorated, they are impressive, and they are, well, everywhere. (Oh, and the boards are always detached.)

I sometimes ponder people’s relationships with these books. It seems these books often come out of a recently deceased grandmother’s house, often stored in a garbage bag, and people seem to assign to them an intriguing value. They have sentimental value but not a lot. (They are not on the top 10 list of things to pull out of a burning house.) They are so large, and ornate, and unlike modern books that people presume they must be of monetary value. (They are usually of insignificant financial value. Here’s a good column about the cash value of these books. http://www.goshen.edu/mhl/oldbibleworth.html )

So, when I get approached by someone with one of these books I am challenged with a variety of responses. Inwardly I do groan, but I also remember the fascination I felt when I first encountered one of these bibles – they are impressive – and I try to express some sympathy for their enthusiasm. I talk a bit about the history of these bibles – how they were often sold by traveling salesmen and you could purchase additional features like sheets for genealogical records, etc. I try to talk gently but realistically about their preservation challenges with the old leather and the heavy weight. Then, my usual response is twofold: it would be best kept in a box, or at least wrapped in acid free paper; and the most personally significant part of the bible is probably any pages that record family names, dates, etc, and I suggest making and mounting good color copies of these pages. I also give them a couple handouts with information, the AIC “How To Protect Your Books” handout, and a sheet I’ve created with suggested websites, suppliers, books, and a list of Michigan binders & conservators. People are usually happy with this response – I think many are happy just to have someone pay attention to their family memorabilia. And, I’m glad when my conversation about another “old family bible” is complete and hope the next conversation doesn’t come too soon.

(Picture of bible from Wonderlane.)

Happy Preservation Week

2011-04-25T05:26:00.000-05:00

Happy Preservation Week!