Structural Intervention: Treatment of Albums from the Iconography Collection

As a Samuel H. Kress Conservation Fellow, I have been spending my first post-graduate year revamping Rauner’s Iconography Collection. The Iconography Collection is an image-based collection which includes prints, photographs, negatives, albums, and various other materials.  In my initial survey of the collection I found that a number of the top treatment priorities were albums.  I decided to focus on treatment of these albums not only because they were in poor condition, but also because this allowed me to further explore my interest in album structures. 

Example of a damaged album discovered during the survey.

   

In conservation we try to preserve the original structure of the books we work with, but there are times when the original structure is inherently problematic and must be altered to prevent future damage. I have found that this is especially applicable to albums.  A common condition issue was that either one or both of the boards were detached. 

For the album shown below, I successfully reattached the boards and preserved the original structure of the album.  The detachment occurred between two of the front pages, and the spine covering had pulled away from the text block.  I cleaned the old adhesive from the inside of the spine covering and the spine of the text block, and then placed new linings on both.

Carte-de-visit album before treatment, showing detached front board.

 Here you can see that the new spine lining was used to successfully reattach the front board.

  

Carte-de-visit album after treatment, showing reattached front board.

  

However, for some of the other albums treated, such as the next example shown below, I decided that returning the album to its original structure was not the best solution.      

  

Carte-de-visit album before treatment, showing detached front pages 
and detached cover.

While I placed a new lining on the text block spine and attached the text block to the back cover, I chose to leave the front board detached. Reattachment would have made the album too difficult to open and would have caused it to break again in the same exact manner. 

  

Carte-de-visit album after treatment, showing reattached front pages and front cover 
left purposefully detached  (back cover has been attached to the text block).

My favorite album from the collection features stunning watercolors from 1857-58 made by Sir Henry Hugh Clifford, who was stationed in Canton, China an Assistant Quartermaster General in the British Army.  While Clifford was stationed in China to serve in the Second Opium War, his meticulous paintings capture serene and colorful landscapes and portray scenes of everyday life in China.

Watercolor painting by Sir Henry Hugh Clifford entitled "Chinese Junk"

As we are nearing the end of a long, cold winter, this album has been a treat to work with, and has led me to start fantasizing about warmer weather and beaches.

Watercolor painting by Sir Henry Hugh Clifford entitled "Sunset, Victoria".

Prior to treatment, the album was bound in a post-style binding.  After close examination, it became clear this was not the original binding structure and the cover did not add informational value to the object. 

Overall image of album: please note the significant amount of
surface dirt on the pages in the upper right.

Detail of post binding structure: cord strung through two holes through
text block and tied together, pages are not secure.

We decided that removing the album from the binding completely and storing the leaves in an enclosure was the best solution, because this will allow for easier access and prevent strain on the pages.  While dis-binding the album, I conducted dry surface cleaning of the pages to remove the highly noticeable, easily-transferable dirt.

Dry surface cleaning a page from Sir Henry Hugh Clifford's album using
cosmetic sponges.

Album page after surface cleaning.

Album page before surface cleaning.

Collectively, these treatments show that, while we strive toward minimal intervention, altering the structure of bound materials is sometimes the best course of action to prevent further damage. 

Written by Tessa Gadomski

Smith & Wolff at the New Hampshire Institute of Art exhibit

Sarah Smith, Book Arts Special Instructor, and Stephanie Wolff, Assistant Conservator, both have work on display at the New Hampshire Institute of Art exhibit: Artists' Books: From A to Zine.

The exhibit runs until April 29, 2015 and is located in the Amherst Street Gallery of the Institute in Manchester, NH.

File Validation Woes

Over the last few months I have been preparing and ingesting the master TIFF files for the Photo Files collection into our local repository system for safe keeping. The first step is to package the files using the BagIt specification. BagIt was developed by the Library of Congress and the California Digital Library as a way to package files along with some basic metadata that can be used to validate the bags contents. It's the digital equivalent of putting a bunch of things in a box, along with a list of the box’s contents and a unique identifier that can be used to identify each item. Since our Photo Files collection is enormous (so far I’ve deposited over 45,000 images, and we’re not even half way through the collection), I break the bags into manageable chunks for uploading and processing in our repository.

Once a bag is uploaded onto the server, it is validated using the BagIt tool. This is a programmatic way of checking that all the files are still exactly as they should be, and no file has been altered or gone missing or snuck in on the sly. Finally, the contents of the bags are run through the File Information Tool Set, or FITS. FITS brings together a bunch of open-source tools that identify file types, check to see if those files are valid, and extract technical metadata. So, for instance, when I deposit a bag from the Photo Files collection, FITS produces a report that says “These files are TIFFs! These TIFFs are well formed and valid! Here’s some technical info you might want to have around!”, only with less exclamation marks:

Sample FITS report

So, this process has been going along just swimmingly until a few weeks ago. Like I said, I’d made it through about 45,000 images, and then suddenly, BAM! an error report for every single image:

page-masters/Icon1647-0875-0000010A.tif is not valid: "Type mismatch for tag 700; expecting 1, saw 7"

All about the Tagged Information File Format (TIFF):

The first thing I discovered was that this error message had something to do with the T part of the TIFF. The TIFF file format has what’s called a header that uses tags to describe the content of the file. These tags, and the information in them, can be manipulated using various types of tools. The capture software we use to create our master images automatically inserts certain tags. As part of our process, we add additional information into the headers of our TIFFs. This is called embedded metadata, or information about the file that is part of the file itself.

The problem with these images was the 700 tag. From the Library of Congress’ super useful guide to TIFF tags I learned that this tag has something to do the XMP metadata within the file. XMP is a data model for structuring embedded metadata. Data models for metadata help standardize how metadata is stored. For instance, I could edit an image to say “Author: Jane Doe”, while someone else might edit it to say “Photographer: Jane Doe” and we could both mean the same thing. A data model would say, “Ok, everyone, we’re going to use the term Creator.” This makes it easier for both humans and computers to make use of embedded metadata, making digital objects more discoverable and easier to maintain.

So, now I knew that there was a problem with the metadata we were embedding in the files. Something about a 1 and a 7? Deep inside the Photoshop user forums, I found that I was not the first one to run across this problem. These numbers refer to the type field in the XMP, with 1 meaning “byte” and 7 meaning “unknown”. So these files said "unknown" when they should have said “byte”, right? Well, not really. According to David Franzen (Employee)’s response in the user forum, both the 1 and the 7 were valid values. So why was I getting this error message?

JHOVE and FITS:

As mentioned above, FITS packages together a number of tools. The tool that was giving this error message was Jhove, or JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment. According to wikipedia, Jhove tells us whether or not objects are “well-formed (consistent with the basic requirements of the format) and valid (generally signifying internal consistency).” The version of Jhove that is packaged in FITS says that in order for a TIFF to be well formed, tag 700 needs to have a “1”, and anything else is invalid. But it also seems that the "7" is also a valid value for this tag. So, why is there this discrepancy in what makes a valid TIFF? Well, it turns out that when Jhove was first developed, the TIFF format specifications weren’t exactly easy to decipher. The TIFF specifications encoded in the tool were based on confusing, incomplete and scattered documentation. When others started getting the same error message as I got, they turned to Adobe for clarification. As a result, Jhove’s code was updated in version 1.8 to accept both “byte” and “unknown” as valid values in the 700 tag.

However, the updated version of Jhove didn’t make its way into FITS. Apparently, there were some other changes to Jhove 1.8 that would make integrating the newer version into FITS a rather large job. Making the necessary changes to FITS to accept newer versions of Jhove currently isn’t a priority for the FITS developers.

The Real Culprit:

Now that I knew what was causing the error message, I circled back to the big question- why now? The first 45,000 files had been just fine. What changed? In discussion with our digital production team, I learned that there had been a significant change to the production workflow, specifically in how they were adding embedded metadata. What before had been a time consuming process was greatly simplified by using Adobe Bridge to quality check images and add metadata. In researching this error message, I had seen people mention Bridge as the culprit in changing the 700 tag.


                          

Testing embedded metadata settings:

To be sure, I decided to play around with the settings in both our capture software and Bridge to see if I could get a different result. I created a number of test images with different metadata settings using our capture software, then ran these through FITS. All checked out okay. Next, I played around with the metadata setting in Bridge, and made changes to the embedded metadata in my test files. I ran the files through FITS again, and all failed to validate. No matter what settings I used in Bridge, the 700 tag was changed.

So Now What?

Now that we knew what was causing the error, there were a number of different approaches we could take. To find out what we did, stay tuned for my next blog post...

Written by Jenny Mullins

Good Deeds from Conservation

Summer can be a good time to reach out and do those special projects that have been on the back burner. One of those projects for us was the Art Oversized collection housed in a small room that struggles with environmental conditions. When there I would upload temperature and humidity information from the data logger and I noticed how the books were shelved.  During these summer terms we often have students working every day with longer shifts. Last summer we were fortunate to have a student working with us who was interested in conservation and wants to have a career in the field. So I thought this would be good practical experience in basic conservation outreach, getting a lot of bang out of a little muscle and sweat.

Oversized material poses a challenge when it comes to shelving. We are fortunate to have shelves that are designed for these types of large items. But how should they be organized and kept safe?

  

Large heavy books were located on top shelves which made them difficult and potentially dangerous to retrieve, and large thin portfolios were unable to lie flat.

  

Over time disfiguration can occur when a book is slouched or forced into an awkward position.

So to begin the process I approached the curator and proposed that over a course of a few days the student and I could come in and clean and tidy up in order to return the books to a more fitting posture and refresh the very small space.  The offer was well received as the staff there has no time to address such a project.

We brought in a small vacuum, a book truck, face masks, gloves, ear plugs, lab coats, a spray bottle and lots of paper towels. The books and shelves were quite dusty so we needed to do a good amount of cleaning. Working as a team was the best way to go. I had done this type of project when I was a student, along with a co-worker, and we ended up making a lot progress and having quite a good time. 

  

We started at the top of one end of the shelving and worked our way down and over. One person would do an initial vacuum over the books and shelf and then would hand the books to the other person who would put them on the book truck. The books would then be vacuumed more thoroughly moving the nozzle across the surface and around the edges in a forward motion. Our colleagues at the University of Washington created this nice video on cleaning if you are interested in more details on cleaning books: http://www.lib.washington.edu/preservation/preservation_services/clean

The other person would mist a bit of water over the bare shelf to minimize the dust from spreading, and wipe it dry removing the dirt and dust. Books were then returned to the shelf. We did have flexibility to slightly alter the location of the books, so when very large heavy books were on a top shelf we could relocate them to a lower shelf. We were also able to reunite sets of books that had gotten separated.

We were careful to take breaks and not spend too many hours in a single visit.

So over a course of a few days, working for just a few hours a day, we were able to transform the space into a more functional and pleasant area. The books are easier to find and danger from heavy books falling from a top shelf was removed. Our efforts were appreciated by both the staff and the books! Summer is slowly approaching so it’s not too early to start thinking about your good deed project! Maybe one for “Preservation Week”. http://www.ala.org/alcts/confevents/preswk