For Preservation Week, we decided to treat ourselves to the best staff development imaginable: a five day intensive workshop with Julia Miller on early historical structures. We learned so much from Julia and we are beyond grateful for her to coming to the Lab for this workshop! What an amazingly knowledgeable instructor and wonderful human being; thank you Julia for sharing your knowledge with us!
We will probably share a more in-depth post about what we learned later, but for right now I created a compilation video of time-lapse videos I captured during our workshop. Hope you enjoy!
Jessica Ebert [UCL] – Conservation Tech/Photographic Documentation Tech
Tag Archives: Jessica Ebert
The Preservation Lab – in the news!
The Preservation Lab and lab staff were in the news twice this week.
The News Record 3/27/2019
Check out a nice write up on the work of the Lab in the student newspaper, The News Record, HERE.
“Below the main floor of Langsam Library, where students bustle about studying, researching and caffeinating, there’s a lab where books with torn pages and cracked bindings fall into the capable hands of a team of technicians who spend their days quietly restoring texts back to working order.” —- Sami Steward
Edible book by Jessica Ebert
Also, Jessica Ebert was interviewed about her participation in the annual University of Cincinnati Libraries’ Edible Book Festival by the local news station. Check it out HERE.
Holly Prochaska (UCL) — Preservation Librarian
Fun with PhotoDoc – In the News (Edition 9)
Check out this new article written by our lead photographic documentation technician, Jessica Ebert, on the exciting world of photographic documentation in the Preservation Lab: http://libapps.libraries.uc.edu/source/photo-documentation-in-the-preservation-lab/
This is an example of one of the pieces that was photographed under UV radiation in a recent workshop Jessica attended through AIC. In this workshop at Duke University, taught by conservator Jennifer McGlinchey Sexton, participants learned how to identify the best UV lamps for conservation documentation, how to test for visible light leakage, and how to standardize UV documentation workflow using the Target UV (to the right of the painting).
A Little Box Magic
I just had to share this beauty of a box that was made by conservation technician, Chris Voynovich, to house the Public Library’s collection of Marguerite Lloyd’s diaries. These ten diaries are part of the library’s Genealogy & Local History Department. Marguerite Lloyd was the daughter of Major Harlan Page Lloyd, the former law partner of Alphonso Taft, the father of President William Howard Taft.
Chris created this lovely cloth covered clamshell box with two removable trays that each house 5 diaries. The compartments for the two smaller diaries have a custom fill to accommodate for their smaller size. All the diaries have received a polyester jacket and the linen tabs under each volume make them easy to remove and handle.
Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Technician, Lead Photographic Documentation Tech
Fun with PhotoDoc: Infrared Again (Edition 8)
It’s been a while since my last Fun with PhotoDoc post, so I wanted to share some progress I’ve been making with Reflected IR. You might remember from my last PhotoDoc post, we purchased a modified UV-Vis-IR camera from MaxMax at the end of 2017. Our first two objects we (Ashleigh and I) examined and documented with the camera were a great learning experience, but didn’t exactly leave me with goosebumps. Still it was a good experience and we worked out the use of the various filters and the general IR workflow.
Fast forward to April when the lab received not one but two books from UC in need of IR photography. The first was the Masters thesis of Ralph E Oesper from the Oesper History of Chemistry collection. The curator wished to exhibit several of the pages from the volume, but upon inspection Ashleigh (our conservator) was concerned that the purple text ink might be dye based, which is very light sensitive.
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- Normal illumination image
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- Near infrared image
The ink disappearing under near IR is a clear indicator that the ink is most likely dye based, and while that made Ashleigh very happy and validated her choice to create printed surrogates of the pages for exhibition, I still felt a little less than wow’d. I was still waiting for a really compelling and dramatic IR example.
Enter volume 1 from the Third German Protestant Church of Cincinnati collection, an 18 volume collection of early Cincinnati baptismal, marriage, and funeral records from the Archives and Rare Books Library that pre-dates the city records. In this case, Ashleigh wanted me to examine and document 4 pages within the volume with faint graphite inscriptions on paper with heavy foxing.
Side by side comparison of one page under normal illumination and near infrared
Finally! A satisfying IR session with helpful results. Documenting all four pages using reflected IR allows for the foxing to disappear from the page, thus making the faint graphite inscription easier to read. After converting the IR image to grayscale I also upped the contrast significantly, allowing for better readability of the handwriting. In the end, we now have four pages of legible inscriptions and I’m very happy with the results.
Click on an individual image to see the gif in action for that page…
I definitely still have a lot to learn when it comes to near infrared photography, but I would call this, not only a satisfying experience, but progress that will hopefully lead to a better workflow. This round of IR photography definitely was not seamless, but I did learn more, as I do every time I shoot, and it is my hope that the more I do the more I will streamline and improve our IR workflow.
Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Technician, Lead Photographic Documentation Tech
2018 Preservation Week Open House Video
Were you unable to attend our annual preservation week open house at the end of April? OR maybe you did attend but didn’t get to see everything you wanted? Well, have no fear! I’ve created a quirky little video to encapsulate (fyi, that’s a scrapbook conservation joke) all the excitement, activity, and overall bombardment of information and cool stuff to your senses that our open houses generally entail.
A big thank you again to everyone who was able to make it and celebrate Preservation Week with us. This was definitely our biggest, most jammed packed year yet and it was so much fun! If you missed the event, definitely mark your calendars for next years’ preservation week, April 21-27, 2019 and stay tuned at the beginning of 2019 for an exact open house date. Until next time…
Our conservator, Ashleigh, ordered these GLOP custom temporary tattoos for all the staff members and we all couldn’t wait to sport them during the event! GLOP is our little nickname for our team and our preservation friends and it stands for Gorgeous Ladies/Lads of Preservation.
Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Technician (and maker of quirky Lab videos)
Open House Success
A big thank you to everyone who was able to attend our Preservation Week Open House last Thursday! It was a great success and we all had so much fun sharing what we do with everyone. If you were not able to attend, we wanted to share the awesome comic that our very own Chris Voynovich (conservation technician) created just for the event.
ScrapbookOnePgWonder_CV_withInterior
Attendees were able to create their own one-page wonder featuring this comic and then had a chance to flip through the Madisonville Branch Library’s scrapbook that inspired the comic. Those who attended were also able to explore various artist book structures by viewing and handling (and in some cases, just admiring from a far) collection items from the DAAP Library’s artist book collection. The evolution of the book was a central theme with attendees learning about pre-codex structures (like cuneiform tablets and scrolls), early codex structures (with a foray into medieval bindings and parchment), and modern structures like the ever complex scrapbook. Attendees were able to stamp their own book mark, featuring a quote by P.J. O’Rourke, and learn about RTI, how the lab has improved their capture process, and view the results from a recent RTI project featuring cuneiform tablets. And of course, attendees were able to grab a Busken cookie featuring our Preservation Lab logo. It was a great event!
Make sure to mark your calendar for 2019 Preservation Week (April 21–27) so you can come down, visit the lab, and see the cool stuff we’re working on. I’m also working on a little video of the event, so stayed tuned and check out our MediaSpace channel for updates in the near future.
Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Technician & Lead Photographic Documentation Tech
The Preservation Lab…in the news
Check out this new article about the work of the Preservation Lab by our collaborator Melissa Norris, with assistance from Ashleigh Schieszer, Jessica Ebert, and Kevin Grace at https://libapps.libraries.uc.edu/source/preserving-taft/.
Isn’t Preservation just so cool!
Ashleigh Schieszer works on Taft’s maquette. (Photo credit Jessica Ebert)
And for our loyal followers a bonus image of the housing of the William Howard Taft letters…
Encapsulated binding by Chris Voynovich, design by Ashleigh Schieszer (photo credit Jessica Ebert)
Fun with PhotoDoc: Infrared (Edition 7)
At the end of last year the lab purchased a modified UV-Vis-IR Nikon through MaxMax so that we can start to play around with infrared photography. Infrared photography (IR) is commonly used in fine art conservation as an examination tool. Reflected IR can be helpful when trying to identify pigments, inks, coatings, etc. and transmitted IR can helpful for viewing watermarks, underdrawings, and linings. We’ve only just started dabbling with IR photography, but I wanted to share some photos from my most recent session with reflected IR.
This is a full leather photo album from the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County’s collection. This early 1900s photo album contains hand-colored silver gelatin photographs taken by A. Nielen. The photographs appear to depict his travels through the US and Canada, and various landmarks and neighborhoods of Cincinnati are represented.
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- Before treatment
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- After treatment
This seemed like a good object for reflected IR because of the hand-coloring on the photographs and the white ink inscription below each photograph. I began by taking a representative visible light image (first image below) using our modified UV-Vis-IR camera, incandescent lighting, and the X-Nite CC1 filter on our 50mm lens. Then, being careful not to move the position of the camera or the object, I switched to the X-Nite 830 filter (830nm) and converted that image to grayscale in Photoshop (second image below). Then I took my visible light image and my reflected IR image into Photoshop to create the false-color image (third image below). The digital false-color image is a combined representation of the visible and infrared images, and it’s actually quite simple to make. You basically copy and paste the various channels for the VIS and IR image as follows, green to blue, red to green, and IR to red. The false-color image allows you to better differentiate and characterize the various materials (pigments, inks, etc.) and potentially even identify them if you have sufficient known samples to use as references.
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- Normal illumination
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- Near infrared with wavelength at roughly 830nm
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- False color
Like I said, we’ve only just started using IR and we’ve got a long way to go, but I’m looking forward to experimenting and learning more about it as time goes on.
Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Technician & Photographic Documentation Tech
Making the Perfect Wheat Starch Paste
As I’m sure anyone in a book & paper lab will attest, good wheat starch paste is key to most, if not all conservation treatments. And achieving that perfectly smooth and lump-free paste is often easier said than done. So when the Preservation Lab crew returned from UC’s winter seasonal days off, the first thing on the docket for our resident paste maker, Veronica Sorcher, was to make a brand new batch of wheat starch paste to start the new year off right! My purpose in documenting her through this process was two fold: first, it’s been ages since I’ve made paste myself (because Veronica almost always does it – she loves it and we love her for always making it!) and I could use a refresher, and secondly, I thought it would be interesting to show the making of (or behind-the-scenes, BTS, if you will) of something so core to the day-to-day conservation in the lab. To give those who might not understand how much attention is put into the quality of every aspect of what we do here in the lab. Plus, I thought it might be fun! I hope you enjoy…
A huge thank you to Veronica for being the paste making master she is and allowing me to film her and to Catarina for allowing me to film her while she strained and used the lovely paste that had just been made.
Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Technician