Happy Holidays!

It's the holiday season and we're all looking forward to spending time with our families, playing in the snow, and drinking hot cocoa by the fireplace (but never while reading a library book...cocoa and paper do not mix!).

Unfortunately, due to the holiday break, there won't be any new blog posts for the next two weeks. For some holiday-themed reading while we're gone, be sure to check out this post from last year about an internship project to conserve a Rudolph-the-Rednosed-Reindeer scrapbook.

Happy holidays from everyone in Preservation Services! We'll see you in 2012!

Binding the Collected Works of Liszt, Part 2

Reporting from the commercial binding desk, it’s time to follow up on the progress of the Collected Works of Liszt project. Last I reported, I had sent out twenty-nine music scores for rebinding from the Collected Works of Liszt. Some volumes were in worse condition than others but all were considerably dirty and at risk of pages yellowing and becoming brittle. Some volumes had torn or loose pages and others had broken bindings.

All twenty nine Liszt scores were delivered back to Preservation Services right on schedule. I checked them in right away to confirm there weren’t any missing volumes. The Liszt scores were rebound in yellow book cloth (chosen by the staff at Paddock Music Library) and with flat spines to allow for the fullest opening when being used. Finally I attached a barcode sticker to each volume. Barcode stickers correspond to electronic item records in the library database which allows for fast and easy search and tracking of each volume.

At this point the Liszt scores are ready for stage two, mass deacidification. Because I am working with so many volumes at once, they will be shipped out as a group to a vendor, Preservation Technologies. Deacidification is a process that utilizes chemistry to neutralize the pH of book and paper materials to prevent or slow deterioration caused by acidity.

With page repairs, rebinding, and barcoding already complete it was simple to prepare the Liszt scores for this process. I packed the volumes into crates, following instructions provided by the vendor to pack books spine down. I included a packing slip listing each volume, corresponding barcode, total number of volumes, and total number of crates. From this point it won’t be long until they are back on the shelf. Upon return from mass deacidification I’ll give one final check and send them along to Paddock Music Library.

Written by Elizabeth Rideout

Preserving Licensed Electronic Resources, Part 2

In my previous post on preserving subscription-based electronic resources, I talked about some of the challenges of ensuring long-term access to these materials. I talked a little about our participation in Portico and LOCKSS, and I also mentioned that for some of our e-resources, we manage the archival content ourselves. Here are the details about how we’re handling that here at Dartmouth.

For many electronic resources, including e-journals and digital collections, the publisher sends us a backup copy of the content, which usually arrives on DVDs or on external hard drives. This content consists of a large set of files, generally in XML, PDF, and/or image formats, although we occasionally receive other formats as well, ranging from document files to proprietary database files.

We run this data through a series of programs to check for viruses (just in case…it’s better to be safe than have our machines corrupted by a virus) and identify and validate the file formats of the content. We’ve been experimenting with tools for the file format identification, including DROID, JHOVE, JHOVE2, and FITS, which actually combines DROID, JHOVE, Exiftool, the National Library of New Zealand Metadata Extractor, and the Windows File Utility. We’ve found FITS to be great because it provides such comprehensive information about our data.

Then we use the BagIt packaging tool to create packages, or “bags”, containing all of the content. BagIt creates a manifest for each bag, which lists all of the files within that bag, along with a checksum for each file that we can use in the future to verify that none of the data in the file has changed over time. We also add some additional metadata about the content…mostly to help our future selves remember what the content is, where it came from, and what we’ve done to it.

Finally, we move the content to redundant external hard drives and store them in secure locations. The purpose of the redundant hard drives is to ensure that there are multiple copies of every file we’re preserving, in case something should happen to one copy (basically, backups of our backups).

Of course, having a copy of these files sitting on hard drives across campus is hardly a sound preservation strategy! So we take some steps to ensure that the content will be accessible and usable over time. This includes periodically retrieving the hard drives and checking the data to make sure it’s still valid, accessible, and usable. Over time we might migrate some of the data to new file formats, add new information to the metadata files, or even de-accession the backup files if we no longer need to preserve them.

It’s a time-consuming process, but an important one if we want to make ensure that we can provide access to these materials 10, 20, or even 100 years from now. Looking forward, we’re hoping to automate the majority of this process to save time. Digital preservation is an ongoing work-in-progress!

Written by Helen Bailey

Beasty Beasts and Mystery Mammals

The historie of fovre-footed beastes ... Collected out of all the volumes of Conradvs Gesner, and all other writers to this present day. By Edward Topsell.

There are some texts that get used in Special Collections all the time, and "The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes" is one such book. It is filled with fantastic illustrations of animals from far and wide, often drawn from written description, which results in a very literal translation of the rendering. Therefore the rhinoceros has truly a coat of armor and the fleeting unicorn is in full view.

The book needed conservation work because the board attachment had become weak and the boards were no longer attached to the text block. The condition of the boards was poor with compromised corners and overall weak inner strength, so the decision was to rebind. Because of the larger size of the book and the knowledge that it receives heavy use, I chose to rebind using a split board construction.

The frontispiece was weak from wear, the paper soft like a paper towel and solid. I surface cleaned and then sized it with a weak solution of methyl cellulose. I have done this on a few occasions and have been very satisfied with the resulting reconditioned\resized page.

Next I attached extended linen tabs, did a base sewing then sewed on a split board style endsheet. To make a split board endsheet, I tip down a cloth hinge to a folio with the pretty side of the cloth glued.

Place the hinged folio inside another folio. This is the endsheet which will be sewn through the inner folio when sewing to the text block.

I placed an inner Japanese paper hinge on the text block before sewing the endsheet, and after the endsheet is sewn on I tip it to the paper hinge. The endsheet is kept larger so that I can trim it to size after it is firmly attached to the text block. Here I have placed a strip of release paper to prohibit the hinge from sticking to itself while drying.

Weighing down the endsheet after being attached to the inner tissue hinge:

Trimming the endsheets to size:

After the endsheet is trimmed the linen tabs get glued down to the outside folio. Then the front edge of the outside folio gets glued back onto itself up to the base of the joint.

This laminate of the two layers of paper with the linen tabs in between gets trimmed back to about 2 inches, resulting in a flange that will be inserted into the split board. The exposed cloth hinge will be glued down to the inside of the board after they are attached. The area at the head and tail is cut back to accommodate the turn-ins of the spine covering material.

The split board is made of a laminate of binders board and 10point folder stock. An area of about 2 inches is left unglued to allow for the insertion of the flange. This is all glued up so that the boards are firmly attached. I allow for a French groove so that the board clears the shoulder when opening.

I’ve chosen a colored linen cloth to cover the spine. Instead of sewing on new endbands I have placed a filler cord inside of the head and tail turn-ins. The spine gets tied up so the cloth remains adhered around the cords. After drying, the sides are covered, the inner cloth hinge gets glued to the inside board and then I attach the doublures.

I have salvaged the title from the old spine and mount it to the new binding:

Now the Beasty Book is ready for many consultations.

Written by Deborah Howe