Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Preservation Week 2011

Protect Your Treasures: Preserving Personal Collections

Dartmouth College Library presents a personal treasures preservation event as part of the 2nd Annual ALA Preservation Week. This event is part of a national celebration initiated by the American Library Association to raise awareness of cultural heritage preservation within the community.

Special One-Day Event, Wednesday, April 27, 2011 11am-1pm

Baker-Berry Library, DCAL Conference Room

Dartmouth College Library’s Preservation Services department is hosting a two-hour personal treasures preservation event. Faculty, students, staff, and community members are invited to bring questions about personal documents, family photos, and memorabilia for advice on how to best preserve those treasured items.

If you have a sample item from your collection, please feel free to bring it along with your questions. We will provide information about best practices in storage, handling, and general preservation guidelines for a wide range of materials, including:

  • Photographs
  • Books
  • Documents and art on paper
  • Film, video, and home movies
  • Records, tapes, CDs and other audio materials
  • Digital items such as documents, photographs, and other personal files
  • Textiles

**Please note: we will not provide any monetary appraisal of items. If you are interested in assessing the value of your treasures, we recommend having them evaluated by a professional appraiser.

Click here for more information!

Just a taste

This week we have a very special treat! A guest blog from our very own Stephanie Wolff, Dartmouth Library Preservation Services' Conservation Technician. When faced with an interesting repair she offered to blog about it.

So without further ado, take it away Stephanie.

Every once in a while a book comes in for repair with damage from an animal chewing it. This often occurs at the corners of books, such as on this particular volume.


Though these pages are intact with no damage, it is important to fix the corner, so the cover can continue to fully protect the text block from any future accidents.

To repair the corner I first wanted to prepare the cover to hold a new piece of board. I made a straight cut at the edge of the damage, through the black paper covering material, so my new piece would fit well. I then evened out any bumps in the rest of the damaged corner. Then I took a piece of mat board about the same thickness as the book board and trimmed it to a triangle, with a square corner and slightly oversized. I peeled back some of this new board to evenly fit onto the remains of the old in an overlapping manner. After gluing these pieces together, I then glued both front and back of the new corner with paper, anchoring it onto the existing board at the same time. Once dry I trimmed the outer edges of the new corner piece to the final size.

Finally I covered the front of the new corner board with black paper, overlapping the old black paper slightly, and attached a new pastedown corner piece on the inside cover. Done and back to the stacks, with the board able to fully protect the text once again.

Written by Stephanie Wolff

Monday, March 28, 2011

Book Arts: Spring Schedule

The Spring schedule for the Book Arts Program is now available. There are a number of binding classes being offered in addition to the Letterpress Intensive.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Digital Preservation Series, Part 1 – What Are We Preserving, Anyway?

Given that I spend much of my time working on digital preservation, I thought it might be fun to talk a little bit about what digital preservation actually is and why it’s an important part of the work we do in this department. But when I started writing, I realized that “a little bit” isn’t enough to cover everything about the massive subject that is digital preservation. So I’m breaking it down into a series, and here for your reading pleasure is the series debut.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago in my post on the e-Resources Fair, Preservation Services is heavily involved in the process of digitizing materials from the Dartmouth College Library collections. I talked about the conservation work that is often associated with digitization, and I talked about the actual scanning and publishing process, in which Preservation staff are also participating. What I failed to mention before was the other preservation aspect of digitization, which is actually the one I’m most involved in…digital preservation. Yes, there is another whole stage of the digitization process, and it’s one that tends to get noticed least because if it works correctly, it is invisible to the researcher viewing this material on our website.

But why is digital preservation important? Well, let’s continue looking at the digitization process as an example. When we create digital versions of our physical collections, we end up with a lot of files. These include image files (like JPEGs, TIFFs, and PDFs), text files (usually in the form of PDF and XML documents), and even audio and video files (such as MP3s). And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Digitizing a single book can produce hundreds of image files plus one or more text files. Digitizing a whole collection of manuscripts or photographs produces thousands of images.

These thousands of files not only take a lot of time and hard work to create, they also become a valuable part of the library collections. Preservation Services is responsible for preserving them, just as we are responsible for preserving the physical materials they are derived from. And the products of digitization aren’t the only digital files we’re concerned with. As I mentioned in my e-Resources post, the Library owns and subscribes to a huge variety of electronic resources, from e-journals to databases to streaming music. The sum total of these resources amounts to millions of files, each of which contains information that we don’t want to lose.

So the big question (from a preservation perspective) is what happens to all the bits, bytes, and files that make up these digital collections? How do we make sure all of this information remains accessible to our student and faculty researchers as technology changes over the next 5, 10, or even 50 years? To understand this problem, we have to understand what the potential risks are to our digital collections. But that’s a whole post in and of itself, so it will have to wait until next time. Stayed tuned for Part 2…

Written by Helen K. Bailey

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

A Cavalcade of Cartoonists

On Friday, March 4th, Preservation Services had quite a collection of visitors. Candidates from the Master's Program at The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) were invited to participate in a Book Arts Workshop created just for them to focus specifically on binding suggestions and techniques that could be applied to their Thesis Packaging that is due in May.

Since I am both a member of the Preservation Services staff and a Cartoonist at CCS, I wanted to bridge the gap between the two and give my classmates (and co-workers) a big treat. As community members we, the Cartoonists, have often attended the Letterpress and Bindery Studio workshops but because there is a limit to how many can participate at a given time, we have to stagger our visits and don't always make the cut, strictly due to space. But here in Preservation Services, we could happily fit all 10 of the participating Cartoonists and give one on one feedback more tailored to combining comics and book binding.

So with the aid of some creative carpooling, and collaborative curriculum planning, I met a group of excited Cartoonists at the Baker Information desk at 10am. After a brief tour and some introductions, there was no time to waste. Deborah Howe began to produce example after example to give just a small taste of the endless possibilities awaiting each Cartoonist's Thesis.


Then we jumped right in to a multi-signature pamphlet stitch.


Jon Chad, Faculty at CCS, uses a jig to puncture his signatures.


Two tables full of Cartoonists sewing their signatures!


Ben Horak (left) and Josh Kramer (right) giggle about starting a 'Book Binding for Men' club.


Betsey Swardlick completes her second kettle stitch, nice and tight!


Stephanie Wolff (right) helps Lawrence Derks line up his signatures.


Lena Chandok (right) starts folding her cover, while Andy Christensen (left) makes sure he's doing it right!


Cartoonists look on as Deborah Howe (far left) scores her cover lightning fast!


Gluing book cloth requires a LOT of concentration!


"I did good!"


Thanks Dartmouth College Library's Preservation Services!



Written by Beth Hetland

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Digital Curation Conference

Last December I had the opportunity to attend the 6th International Digital Curation Conference in Chicago, IL. The conference was a super fantastic two day event. Reviewing my notes there were lots of excellent presentations -- a few that stood out were:

Robin Rice (presenter) - "Research Data Management Initiatives at the University of Edinburgh". Robin mentioned the concepts of high and low curation:

  • High curation would be labor intensive and require human intervention (metadata creation would be a good example).
  • Low curation would be automated (for example checksums or file format validation).
As Dartmouth College Library moves forward with digital preservation these terms and concepts will be helpful in our conversations.

Catherine Ward (presenter) - "Making Sense: Talking Data Management with Researchers". The "Incremental" project was designed to improve research data management within the institution by focusing on providing better advice, training, and support for researchers. It's a very common sense approach and worth referring to as the College designs a program to support data management.

I also participated in a pre-conference, Digital Curation 101 Lite. It was led by Sarah Jones, Martin Donnelly, and Joy Davidson and used the Digital Curation Centre lifecycle model as the basis for the course. It included lots of good advice about knowing your audience and being mindful of language that might scare them off (i.e. data curation).

These notes just scratch the surface of the conference. If you are interested in minding your data and want to learn more about digital curation, follow any of the links in this post. Mark your calendar, the next conference will be held in Bristol, England in December 2011.

Written by Barb Sagraves

Saturday, March 5, 2011

OCLC Research Library Partnership

Dartmouth College Library has accepted an invitation to join the OCLC Research Library Partnership, an international coalition of not-for-profit organizations with research, educational, and cultural missions. This new organization blends OCLC Research and the RLG Partnership and represents a renewed commitment on the part of OCLC to research library development.

Being a member will gain us exclusive access to certain webinars, reports, and other research output, consultative access to OCLC program officers, assistance in user study design, and a voice in the development and priorities of the organization.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Guess what I learned!

Since this is the closest thing to a professional job I've ever had, each day feels new and exciting. I used to dream of being able to work in such an astounding environment. I come to work, check in with my supervisor, like any other job, but then I'm assigned an incredible task where I get to learn new skills, handle delicate and fascinating material, discover hidden treasures and be completely overwhelmed by knowledge.

For each of my blog posts, I'd love to take you along on this journey with me. I am quickly learning a variety of techniques and being trained on several levels of repair and binding by both Deborah Howe and Stephanie Wolff. I entered this position (U.S. Congressional Serial Set Project Specialist) having book binding knowledge and a lot of experience in making multiples. Now that I'm exposed to all the people in Preservation Services and their wide range of backgrounds and accomplishments in fine binding, conservation and digitizing, it's apparent that you never stop learning, especially not in this department.

This week, as part of the repairs I perform on the Serial Set books, I was able to do my first heat set tissue repair on one of the many large scale maps that are part of this phenomenal collection.

Let's go through the steps!

First the map was removed from the volume, but when it's folded in the book it looks like this:




Then I laid it, face down, and applied small weights to help it relax from its folded confinement:


Almost all of the cross-sections where fold meets fold needed a little patch, so working my way from right to left I applied a small amount of the heat set tissue in each spot, took a tacking iron set to medium and gave each cross section a patch. As I worked I moved the weights to ease the tension on the map's already delicate paper.

Toward the far left of the map, there was a big tear right through California!

Since this is a map and we want to make sure all the lines match up, Deborah showed me this nice trick. We flipped the map over and with very tiny pieces (so tiny you can't even see them!) of the heat set tissue I made tackets to hold the map in the right places. Then we flipped the map back over and I laid out large tissue strips to cover the whole tear.

Once the heat set was able to cool we flipped it once more... good as new!

This map was then folded back up and tipped back into that particular Serial Set volume.

This map of the mineral deposits in the United States in 1866 is only one of the many incredible finds within the US Congressional Serial Set!



Written by Beth Hetland