Tag Archives: Storage and Handling

Allegheny River / Capt. J.W. McLaughlin

How to store a 15ft paper scroll?

Back in October of 2024, we received something slightly more unusual from the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library, a 15-foot-long, hand-drawn rolled map of the Allegheny River. Yes, fifteen feet. This map was created by joining smaller sheets edge-to-edge, forming one continuous scroll that looked more like a treasure map than your typical library item.

Scroll with photography target in front of it — Before Treatment – 15ft rolled map as it was received.

A dilemma quickly followed, how do I create a housing solution that’s safe and functional, but won’t turn future handling into a logistical nightmare? Like many libraries, they didn’t have a 15-foot shelf just waiting for this (because who does?), so storing it flat was out. Storing it rolled became our only real option. The enclosure needed to be secure and protective for the map, and ideally, easy and elegant to display when needed.

First things first, some stabilization treatment. Before tackling the housing design, the scroll underwent conservation treatment to mend small tears and fill losses, particularly at the “beginning” and “end” (depending on which direction you follow the river). Once stabilized, it was ready for some housing trials.

scroll partially unrolled — Before Treatment – Large loss and tear at one end.

While researching solutions online, I stumbled upon a fantastic blog post by J.M. Iacchei from the Cornell University Library Conservation Lab (link here). Their approach to scroll housing was clever, practical and elegant, and it just gave me the spark I needed to create our own version.

Here is how we rolled:

A support core – To give the scroll structure while rolling, I created a polyester cylinder core with a polyethylene sling. The sling supports one end of the scroll as it begins to wrap around the core, providing gentle guidance and protection as you start to roll the map. The map can be easily inserted into the sling to begin rolling.

Polyester cylinder core with a polyethylene sling to secure one end of the map.

The end can be easily inserted into the sling and supported as the map is rolled around the polyester core.

Protection of the ends – The opposite end of the scroll was placed into a soft, transparent polyethylene pocket. It’s flexible, unobtrusive, and doesn’t need to be removed, even during after treatment photography.

Keep it rolled – Once fully rolled, the scroll was secured with a polyester belly band. The polyethylene pocket helped protect the scroll surface from any abrasion caused by the belly band.

rolled scroll with belly band to hold it in place — The rolled map is secured with a polyester belly band.

Display ready? – For display,I built a removable tray that cradles the rolled scroll without letting it rest directly on a surface. This tray doubles as a mini display platform, so the scroll can be partially unrolled and supported during handling and exhibit. Functional and elegant.

Rolled scroll secured within an enclosure tray — Display tray that offers support to the rolled map for long term storage.

I also tested a few other methods along the way, like supporting the entire scroll in a single 15-foot polyester sheet or sandwiching it between two. But the seams where the map’s original sheets were joined caused additional creases with those solutions. In the end, supporting the scroll in its entirety just wasn’t viable, so I pivoted to protecting the ends and letting the core do the heavy lifting.

Also: cutting two 15-foot-long sheets of Mylar by hand? Let’s just say I don’t recommend it… and I definitely don’t miss it.

Here is what a 15ft paper map looks like:

Catarina Figueirinhas – Assistant Conservator

The Protective Power of Interleaving

You might know the importance of a protective enclosure, but how often to you consider the quality of storage materials? In fact, the composition of storage materials plays a significant role in the preservation of archival collections. But how?
Since storage plays a passive role, the positive and negative interactions of storage materials may not be readily apparent. Chemical reactions that occur between library and storage materials are often a slow process, spanning over a number of months or years before a visual change occurs. Without the gratification of seeing immediate effects, many may not realize how some storage materials can be problematic, let alone the ramifications for using non-archival materials.

To illustrate some of the effects, I thought I’d share a vivid example of protection from acidic materials during storage. The following photograph shows the positive effects of archival buffering paper (also known as interleaving), as well as the danger of using non-archival boards and tapes – even when they are not in direct contact with the object!
The protected object is a 17^th century printed broadside. It’s a single sheet of paper with printed black text on the front. The broadside was stored for many years in a green cloth-covered portfolio.

Within the portfolio, the broadside was secured beneath with folded sheets of plastic film with a blank sheet of paper. You can see the plastic film is attached to the portfolio around the edges with green tape.

This image shows the front of the blank sheet of paper stored side the plastic film, below the broadside. The plastic has yellowed overtime.

Here, the blank sheet is removed, revealing yellowish-brown discoloration around the top and right edge. This discoloration aligns perfectly with the green tape that is adhered on top of the plastic –located on the top and right side of the plastic.

When you flip the paper over, the back of the blank sheet shows even more discoloration. In fact, the discoloration is a mirror image of the materials below the plastic! This has occurred because the plastic is “breathable.” The materials below are all acidic, except for the white fragments of paper, which protected a portion of the paper from turning brown.

The interleaving paper served two purposes here:

Acts as a support for the broadside when handled.
The interleaving served as a sacrificial barrier that absorbed the bulk of acidic off-gassing from the non-archival paper and tape.

In summary, this enclosure is an excellent example of how different materials can interact with one another in nuanced ways, and how plastic is actually a permeable barrier to gasses overtime!
General storage tips:

When placing interleaving within an archival polyester L-sleeve, make sure the interleaving tissue is larger than the object so you can avoid localized discoloration
Architectural prints, blue prints and some photographs are special. Don’t store these in buffered materials (materials that are above pH 7). Store them with pH neutral materials like polyester film or unbuffered paper.
Check out these resources on selecting archival storage materials:
- Connecting to Collections’ Collections Care Basics: Where Do I Begin?
- National Park Service :
  - Buffered or unbuffered?
  - Blue prints and cyanotypes
- Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI notes):
  - Black and white photographs
  - Color photographs
- Sources for purchasing archival materials:

Ashleigh Ferguson Schieszer (PLCH) —- Book and Paper Conservator

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