Helen Bailey: 2011 DLF Fall Forum Fellowship Winner

I am very pleased to announce that Helen Bailey, Preservation Specialist, was selected to be a 2011 Digital Library Federation Forum Fellow for the upcoming Fall Forum. The DLF, a program of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), is a network of libraries and related agencies pioneering innovative uses of information technologies and community expertise to extend collections and services.

Helen was one of three fellows selected from an international application process and will receive complimentary hotel, travel, board, and registration (up to $1,000) for the 2011 DLF Fall Forum in Baltimore, MD. The Fellowships are awarded to a librarian or LIS student new to the profession, based on strength of application essay, nomination, and resume. This is our second success in this prestigious fellowship program: Mina Rakhra was also a DLF Forum Fellow in Fall 2004.

Helen first joined the Library as an intern in Preservation Services, while finishing her MSIS degree (2009-10), a year later she was the successful applicant for the Preservation Specialist. She has been an active member of a number of Library teams working on digital library issues, most notably the Library's Digital Projects and Infrastructure Group (DPIG), which has just completed a digital program plan, including our first digital preservation policy, to guide our digitization efforts moving ahead.

To read more about Helen and the other 2011 Fall Forum Fellows go to: http://www.diglib.org/archives/2372/

Written by Barb Sagraves

Coloring Japanese Tissue for Repairs

In my conservation work I often repair loose boards using the Japanese Tissue Board Reattachment method devised by Don Etherington. I also use Japanese tissue to cover a board tacket at the repaired hinge. Moriki is the Japanese tissue generally used for both repairs, and while it comes in a variety of colors, for the most part these colors do not match the (often) irregular color of the damaged book’s leather. In an effort to make the repair visually disappear, I tone and mark the paper prior to its application on the book.

I approach the toning in two ways—coloring a smaller piece of paper designed for an individual book, as well as toning larger pieces as “stock” for future repairs. The toning of these “stock” pieces creates a basis for additional alteration in color or visual texture as needed for a particular volume. This is how I color Japanese tissue:

I start with a generous piece (oversized for the particular repair or large enough for multiple future repairs) of moriki Japanese tissue in a base color, usually a mid-range brown. I cut a piece of Mylar larger than the paper as a work surface. Using FW acrylic inks, I drop small puddles on the surface of the Mylar, creating spots of a variety of colors over the area where my paper will go. Some basic colors we use in the lab include: burnt umber, antelope brown, red earth, sepia, and Payne’s gray.

Once enough of these puddles are on the Mylar, I use a wet brush to blend them, brushing in vertical strokes, taking care to maintain the variation in ink color and avoid uniformity.

I hold my paper at the top and bottom (vertically) and dip it into the ink, in a sort of rolling motion, dropping one side down into the ink and immediately raising it up as the next area dips into the ink. The porous nature of the dry paper allows for the ink to wick into it quickly with an even distribution and a variation in color, but without brush marks.

If the ink doesn’t absorb throughout the paper I re-dip into the remaining ink until the paper is thoroughly covered. Sometimes I must dab with the brush to get stubborn dry areas to take the ink.

Once the paper is saturated, I hang the paper to dry, either with clothespins or occasionally taped onto the side of a workbench. When dry, the paper can be further altered by direct applications of ink or with Prismacolor Premier art markers. (The art markers are another Etherington trick passed along to me by conservator Eric Alstrom.) The art markers allow for very specific marks, such as a few irregular spots. The ink can be sprayed over the dry paper using a brush (or toothbrush) to create a sprinkled leather look.

After the paper is dry, it is ready to use in these repairs, such as the finished one pictured here. Many conservators make further color and blending adjustments after the tissue’s application to the book, but I prefer to do my coloring off the book. My approach for toning paper is loose and somewhat serendipitous, much like the variations in the leather on the volumes themselves, but the method seems to work when used for these repairs.

Written by Stephanie Wolff

Welcome, Ryland!

I am pleased to announce that on Monday, October 24, Ryland Ianelli will begin work in Preservation Services as a Project Specialist for the U.S. Congressional Serial Set/Readex Project.

Ryland has a Master of Fine Arts in Cartooning from the Center for Cartoon Studies and a Bachelor's degree in Art History from Reed College. He also has several years of experience working as a Collection Assistant in the Reed College Visual Resources Collection.

In addition to his work on the Serial Set project, Ryland will be helping with digital production and preservation assessment projects.

Please join me in welcoming Ryland!

Helen Bailey
Preservation Specialist

Preserving Licensed Electronic Resources, or - What to Do if You Don’t Own It

In addition to the myriad challenges of preserving digital content, which I outlined in my previous posts on digital preservation (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), ensuring long-term access to subscription-based resources presents additional challenges. The issue with subscription or license models for electronic resources (such as e-journals, e-books, and databases) is that rather than purchasing the content outright, we instead pay for online access to the content. That access is provided to Dartmouth students and faculty either by the publisher or by third-party platforms.

From an access point of view, this is often an excellent acquisition and delivery method. We can license much more content than we would easily be able to manage ourselves, and we can rely on the publisher to handle many back-end technical aspects of getting content to users (although, even under a subscription model there is considerable work on the part of our collections services staff to ensure seamless access from our Library catalog and webpages).

However, from a preservation standpoint, all of this licensed material is content that we do not own or manage. If the publisher were to go out of business or stop providing access to content (and yes, while infrequent, this does happen), our scholars could lose access resources that are very important to their research. Of course that would be quite a problem, and it’s one we want to avoid if possible.

Fortunately, there are several methods we can use to ensure access over the long-term. One method is participation in a membership-based e-journal archiving service. We are currently members of two such services, Portico and LOCKSS, both of which exist to preserve electronic content for the library community. I won’t go into the details here, except to say that these services give us peace of mind for a significant number of electronic resources to which we subscribe.

Another method is to negotiate with the publisher and verify that they have ensured long-term preservation of their content, either through a different third-party service or using their own preservation strategies. While this can be effective and is sometimes the only option, it’s not ideal because, again, the publisher could go out of business and then long-term access isn’t necessarily guaranteed.

The final method is to obtain copies of the digital content and manage it ourselves. This is a more involved process because…well, because we have to do the work of managing the content! So I’ll continue with a detailed description of exactly how we do that in a later post. Stay tuned for more info…

Written by Helen Bailey

Home Movie Day

Celebrate Home Movie Day in the Upper Valley this Saturday, October 15th! The Howe Library will be holding continuous screenings and film assessment from 10am - 5pm. For more information visit their Facebook page.

Book of Hours

Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis ad usum Parisiensem

This lovely little Book of Hours manuscript came to the lab for repair due to a badly damaged cover.

The cover is probably from a late 19th century rebinding. My guess is that the catch plate could have been from the original binding. The current cover seemed to be covered with leather that has been re-purposed, given the odd embossing and color decoration on the surface. The text block was in good condition and did not need to be re-sewn.

It did have poor flexibility:

Here is the opening before treatment:

And after treatment it opens wide enough to see the entire page:

I used laponite to clean the spine as it affords a “dry clean” so the worry of moisture penetrating into the parchment was avoided. The spine was wiped well with a damp cloth to remove any residue from the laponite and lined with a medium weight Japanese paper. This reinstated a decent amount of open-ability back into the text block.

The spine was lined with extended Japanese tissue and the red endbands were reattached.

There was serious deliberation on how to proceed after the spine was cleaned and relined. The ideas varied as I discussed different treatment options with fellow conservators and the curator. One thought was to rebind it in a contemporary historical binding of vellum and keep the leather covers separate but stored with the book. But since the leather covers were still in good condition I finally decided to keep it in the covers I received it in.

In order to help reattach the text to cover I put a light-weight paper hollow tube on the spine:

Once the text block was prepared I addressed the needs of the boards and missing clasp. Even though the boards were in good shape they were a bit soft so I soaked off the paste downs and lined the boards with a piece of 10 point Bristol.

Collaborating with a colleague who worked in the Claflin Jewelry Studio on campus I drew an outline of the needed clasp and she was able to produce a perfect fit!

This was then attached to a new strap made of a leather\vellum laminate.

Using the old tacks and holes I mounted the new strap and clasp to the back board:

I then created a new spine for the cover and cased in the text block. The old spine was remounted and a little touch up with acrylic paint and methylcellulose pulled it altogether.

Written by Deborah Howe

Book Arts Program News - Digital Printing

The final new development for the Book Arts program this year (see developments #1 and #2) is a fantastic new digital printing set-up for use by participants in both the letterpress and the bindery studios. It includes a computer, software, scanner, and printer so students can explore the artistic possibilities of digital printing without leaving the studio! We’re really excited about this, and we hope it gets a lot of use in this year’s workshops and College Course 11, the Book Arts Studio Seminar.

We don't have any specific workshops focused around digital printing yet, but we're open to new ideas and suggestions, so let us know if you have any thoughts on classes you'd like to see us offer. We can't wait to see what creative projects students come up with using this new equipment!

New Offering: Oct. 4 Letterpress Open Studio

A new Letterpress Open Studio session was added to the list of Book Arts offerings. To register for the October 4 session go to this link.