Some small booklets from the 1820s recently came to the Lab to be cleaned and prepared for digitization at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Ashleigh, our Conservator, noticed a couple of them had a small loop of string attached in the upper left hand corner.
Well, the booklets are all copies of “Freeman’s Almanack”. Before the days of smart phone calendars and weather apps, before the days of catching the weather on the radio or TV, people had almanacs. In fact some people still use them today, though these days their scope has expanded and some of them can be many hundreds of pages, depending on the information they contain. Back in the 1800s they usually looked like small magazines. Published yearly, they contained articles and snippets of wit and wisdom the publishers thought their target audience (often farmers) might enjoy. Most important though were the tables, usually organized to represent a calendar month, giving times for sunrise and sunset, astronomical highlights such as eclipses, church festivals, planting dates, and what kind of weather to expect.
So what about the loops?
Well, the almanac would be something a 19th Century family might refer to often, perhaps even daily. Where do you put such a thing in your home so everyone can grab it quickly when they need it? You hang it on a nail of course! How do you do that? You make a little hole in the top left corner of the booklet, you run some string or thread through the hole to make a loop, and you pop the loop over the nail.
Problem (and mystery) solved!
Veronica Sorcher (PLCH) – Conservation Technician
Category Archives: Collection Care
Prepping for a Shift
Stack shifts and moves are an inevitability in libraries. Collections change. Spaces change, more often than not becoming too small for the collection(s). And in the end a shift of collections is imminent. For most collections these stack shifts do not require the intervention of a conservation lab. Periodical bindings moving to another floor? It happens all the time and that’s that. But when special collection items are shifted or moved, the Preservation Lab generally plays a part. So when UC’s Archives and Rare Books Library decided to move and shift the bulk of their oversized special collections between stack levels the Lab was contacted to play a part in the prep work.
The plan? To measure and box as many unstable or unwieldy oversized books that will be moving between floors or shifting within narrow, restrictive shelving stacks before the move in April. In order to keep our current workflow of treatments (both general circulating and special collections) for both institutions going, it was decided that a couple of lab staff would measure the books on-site (ARB Library), have corrugated enclosures created through our commercial bindery vendor, and then as the boxes were received the staff would match up the books with the boxes. Three staff members, Holly Prochaska (librarian), Veronica Sorcher (technician), and myself, took on the duty of assessing the books and taking measurements for those we felt could easily hinder the move or be damaged further by handling and moving.
Measuring in the stacks and making do with the space you have.
At this point we are about half way through the process. We’ve measured over 750 books for enclosures! We enlisted one of our trusty student assistants to record all the data so that we could send it off to the commercial binder. The first batch of 150 boxes arrived and were matched up with the books earlier this week. And luckily, our error rate was actually very low, even with that first batch where we were still figuring out the kinks of measuring in confined spaces and often dim lighting!
What’s the workflow like? Each person has list of numbers that correspond to the number the binder prints on the inside of the enclosure, per our request. For each number, the staff member records the call number (to be printed on the spine of the box), along with the height, width and thickness of the book. A flag with that number written on it (in pencil, of course) is then placed in the book so that it is visible on the shelf and clearly recognizable when matching the boxes to the books. So far, the process has worked pretty well.
What kinds of things are we prepping for storage and handling? Prime candidates for move-prep housing include…
- Any book previously tied with cotton tying tape, usually to hold a detached/loose board or textblock in place.
In this case, boards were detached from the spine/textblock. But let’s just talk about the reason I really took a photo of this book on Christopher Columbus…the anchor clasps and catches! How cool are those?
- Any book with loose, detached, or protruding parts that could be abraded, damaged further, or lost during the move.
When I originally pulled this book off the shelf the measure it the corner was nowhere to be found, but I found it a couple shelves down resting on top of another book.
- Any extremely fragile or flimsy books, including extremely oversized, thin bindings or bindings with fragile paper or degraded leather covers.
This full leather binding must have been fire damaged at some point. The leather on the spine was so fragile and would crack and break if you looked at it the wrong way.
- The evil monster known as RED ROT!
Obviously not all books with red rot were boxed, especially those with very minor cases. But books like this, where the movers and every book in the surrounding area would be covered in a red layer of degraded leather…those get boxes!
If you’re interested in seeing more snapshots from our adventures of measuring in ARB, check out the Preservation Lab’s Instagram, here.
Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Technician
Tiny Tomes – Now on Display!
There’s an exciting new Public Library exhibit located in the Popular Library in the Main Library building downtown. It’s titled, Tiny Tomes and includes over 50 small books that are part of the reference library collection. There are a variety of subjects, binding styles, and time periods represented. Topics include sport flip books, lichens & ferns, children’s books, and many more!
This past week, the Preservation Lab assisted with preparing the books for display. Once the layout of the show was established and pages were selected for display, I helped strap bindings with soft polyethylene strapping and showed staff how to use various supports made out of Vivak and archival mat board. These supports were made beforehand in our lab by lab technician, Chris Voynovich. Since we knew the overall size of the books were generally 4 x 6 inches, a variety of general supports were constructed out of lab scraps rather than custom fitting the supports to each book. This greatly expedited the process of making the book cradles.
Out of approximately 40 constructed supports, every single one was put to use! There were V-shaped supports used to hold books open while lying flat, U-shaped supports to lift up books, triangle shaped supports to act as cradles, and other supports to hold books safely upright.
Some books were too fragile to be opened or had more than one page to exhibit. As an alternative to displaying interior pages, some of the books were scanned by Digital Services and surrogates were printed. These images are also available online, located here: http://cdm16998.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16998coll52.
The exhibit runs from Jan 18th to March 13st. While you’re at Main Library, be sure to check out the Smallest Book on exhibit in the Cincinnati Room, located on the 3rd floor!
Ashleigh Ferguson Schieszer (PLCH) – Book and Paper Conservator
Custom Collapsible Cradle in a Corrugated Box!
We have many occasions to use cradles. Including, in the lab while working on delicate materials and for viewing the text of fragile bindings. In an effort to create a new standard for the lab to store with a book, I revisited the construction of a collapsible cradle that fits inside a corrugated clamshell box.
View of clamshell when lid is opened:
Opening the cradle by lifting the cloth tapes:
Obtuse (left) and acute (right) arm openings are adjustable:
The integral cradle is removable for display! 
I am intrigued by this integral cradle system for a few important reasons:
- The cradle is custom fit for the individual book’s opening and is stored safely with the book in the corrugated clamshell so it won’t become lost.
- The cradle can be made adjustable to accommodate the book’s special handling needs by adding in additional notches.
- The cradle has a base, making it removable from the box. This enables diversity in placement of the supported book. For example, librarians can remove the cradle from the box for exhibition.
- This system is light, yet durable.
- This system is fast and easy to create.
- This system can be shelved with other books making it easily stored and accessible.
Considering all the cradles I have made so far, this one is by far the easiest and fastest to complete!
For a “one size fits all” solution, check out our blog on Elizabeth’s Rideout’s Collapsible Book Cradle.
It has been fun to explore solutions for this support mechanism to strengthen our arsenal of weaponry in the war of conservation!
Chris Voynovich (PLCH) – Conservation Technician
Score!
The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County has recently set a plan in motion to digitize a collection of music scores. But before they can be digitized, the scores need to cataloged at the item level so metadata can be added to the digital files that are uploaded to the Virtual Public Library. But first, they are traveling to the lab to receive stabilization, to improve legibility, and rehousing. There are more than 200 boxes in the collection, each containing fifty or more scores, so this will be an ongoing project for many months to come. Because there are so many, and the Library would like to have them digitized as soon as possible, the decision was made to keep the treatments minimal –enough to stabilize the materials and render them more legible but no more.
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Shrink-wrap, a tool in the toolbox
The Preservation Lab is lucky to have a lot of equipment. One of our more interesting pieces is a shrink-wrap machine. We bring the machine out about once a year when we have a fair amount of bound materials that meet the following criteria:
- part of the general circulating collection;
- an item with a history of little or low use;
- brittle paper, making rebinding or repair impossible or too time consuming;
- replacements are not available or prohibitively expensive considering use.
Before the retirement of Pat Schmude, a UCL conservation technician in the lab for 28 years, we brought the machine up so that he could remind us of all the special things we need to do to make it work optimally — all the things you just don’t find in a manual but you know from 20+ years experience.
And of course we did have a little fun…here is my coffee mug shrink-wrapped. I’m trying to give it up…so far I haven’t broken the seal!
Clockwise – The finished product; Pat Schmude and Ashleigh Schieszer; Ashleigh, Jessica Ebert, and Pat; the coffee cup in question; Ashleigh and Jessica; and Chris Voynovich.
Holly Prochaska (UCL) — Preservation Librarian
Preservation Week 2015!
We love preservation. Of course we do. And as people who love preservation, we naturally love Preservation Week! Truly, we do. We love it so much that we take to the streets and invite people over to share it with us. We were so excited that we decided to start early this year, with live technical demonstrations in the mornings leading up to the big day. We wanted people to see what we were up to, ask lots of questions, and learn more about what we do.
We showed off the past year’s work, including some excellent pieces done by our pre-program volunteer, Catarina Figueirinhas. Everyone’s favorite, the hot stamper, made a return appearance. We topped off the festivities with a raffle for a book, handmade by one of our students, and of course, cookies (we don’t have open houses for the sweets, but they are a nice bonus!). We had such a great time with all of our friends and colleagues, and as always, we look forward to doing it again next year.
Hyacinth Tucker (UCL) — Binding Processor
Pictures (and more) for an Exhibition
Rolling out Elizabeth Rideout’s collapsible book cradle
Last month our lab hosted a little workshop, taught by talented conservation technician, Chris Voynovich (PLCH), on collapsible book cradles. The workshop came about after our conservator shared images of Elizabeth Rideout’s collapsible book cradle with us and explained how beneficial this would be for the special collections holding libraries to have cradles like this on hand. Chris, who is usually the go-to technician in the lab for tricky enclosures, jumped at the opportunity to create a cradle. So without any instructions available he made a collapsible, adjustable cradle based on the images of Rideout’s cradle online. Chris then wrote up some instructions for a standard size cradle that fits most books. With the instructions on hand we went ahead and planned the workshop, inviting colleagues from both UCL and PLCH.
Chris explaining the collapsible cradle and how it works.
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Saving the 70's
Recently I’ve had the opportunity to dis-bind a bound edition of our school newspaper, send it off for digitization and then to create a clamshell box to house the single pages when they return. The process of dis-binding bound newspapers is a very delicate one. In this case, The News Record 1971-72, was no exception. Newspapers, by their very nature are meant to be read and thrown away. The paper they are printed on is not meant to last and it fades and becomes acidic and brittle very rapidly. The solution to preserving the paper’s information back in the early 70’s, before digitization was even a thought, was to bind a couple years’ worth of the News Record together in a hard cover much like a large book. This was a good method for preserving a piece of U.C.’s history, however the binding was meant to be permanent and no thought was given to reversing the process at a later date.
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