Personnel

Rebecca Metois is our Summer Conservation Intern here in Preservation Services from the 27^th of June till the 19^th of August 2016.  She has just completed her first year of bookbinding at the North Bennet Street School in Boston. Rebecca has a library degree from Simmons College and a M.F.A. in painting from San Francisco Art Institute and she is very excited to be here.

Welcome Rebecca!

Space Oddity: Dartmouth Canes

The American Library Association annual conference concluded in early July and while at the conference I gave a presentation to the Book and Paper Interest Group of the Preservation and Reformatting Section of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services. The theme was "Space Oddity" and the presentation had to be given in an Ignite Talk style, in our case 15 slides at 20 seconds each for a total of 5 minutes.

What follows are the slides and my comments for each.

Canes of Dartmouth College
1800-2008

This storage solution for Dartmouth's collection of canes was created by North Bennet Street School summer interns, Becky Koch and Laren Schott, with oversight from Deborah Howe, the Collections Conservator.

The problem was how to store these wooden canes. The bulk of the collection were canes hand carved by Dartmouth students during their senior year. The most common embellishment of the cane head is what is know as the "Indian Head Cane".

Here Deborah and the interns are arranging the canes by size.

Prior to this treatment the canes were stored in a type of umbrella stand with open sides and very little protection. The canes were not stable and would slip and slide within the stand. The enclosure solution used both pre-made boxes and custom fit inserts. To begin, the canes were sorted by size. Most of the canes were a standard length. 

The canes were surfaced cleaned prior to rehousing them. To surface clean them our interns took dry and sometimes slightly moistened (with water) cotton swabs and wiped away soot and dust. No repairs were necessary. All of the canes were in generally good shape.

The housing solution consisted of adapting a pre-made box to hold an insert tray, and thus created two layers for storage: a bottom layer and the insert tray forming the second layer.

Pre-made box.

The pre-made box was purchased from Gaylord. It was made of polypropylene measuring 

38 inches x 24 inches, and about 6 inches deep.

Using heavy, natural cotton webbing, handles for the pre-made box were created and reinforded with Vyvek to help support the weight. The Vyvek is shown inside the box, where the cloth webbing is threaded through. Deborah suggests that in the next iteration of this box she would improve it by adding support stops for the insert tray to the pre-made box.

The insert tray was fabricated from 2 pieces of blue, acid free corrugated board. Adaptations were made because a single sheet was not large enough to build the walls up.

     

For the insert box special attention was also paid in building handles that could withstand the weight of the canes. To do this the cotton webbing was threaded through the bottom of the tray that had been reinforced with a layer of 40pt board for extra support.
                       

In order to separate the canes from each other dividers were made from 10 point map folder stock. The folder stock was creased and folded to create a pocket. Each pocket was about 2 inches deep and 3 inches wide. Two pieces of folder stock were needed to create each divider layer.

To construct the dividers score lines were determined and a pattern was made from a strip of paper. These marks were transferred to the 10 point folder stock.

Both short edges of the 10 point were marked, then the pencil marks were lined up on the edge of the table. The 10 point was creased cross grain to maximize length and to improve rigidity in the walls of the dividers. Because of the length creasing on the board shear was not possible.

The dividers were placed on both the bottom layer and the insert tray. They were not attached in any way – although they could be if desired. Deborah suggests sliding in 40 point strips inside the divider walls to give additional support and rigidity.

With the dividers in place the canes were arranged on each layer and the insert tray placed on top. Each box can hold 16 canes: 2 layers of 8 canes each. When each box set was constructed it was bar coded and labeled with the archival series number.

Bottom layer with canes.

Insert layer in the box with divider and canes.

There were also canes of irregular size: longer than the rest or with heads that made it difficult to apply a standard approach. For these canes the divider was placed diagonally in the box and the canes arranged accordingly.

By the end of the project over 100 canes were cleaned and stored in 8 custom boxes for 24 linear feet, and shelved in the Special Collections remote storage facility. A finding aid for the cane collection now lists the canes by individual box number thus improving not only the storage but also making it easier to retrieve a single cane. By this single conservation treatment both storage and retrieval have been improved.

Thanks to Deborah Howe for collaborating with me to create this Ignite Talk and to Becky Koch and Lauren Schott who designed this storage solution.

Written by Barb Sagraves

Kress Conservation Fellowship

Dartmouth Iconography Collection:

Portrait of Daniel Webster needing the outside case

repaired and possible stabilization of photo.

I am pleased to announce, on behalf of Preservation Services, that we are a recipient of a Kress Conservation Fellowship.

As quoted from their web site: “The purpose of the Kress Conservation Fellowship program is to provide a wide range of post-graduate fellowship opportunities that will help develop the skills of emerging conservators. At the crossroads of science and art, the fields of conservation and technical art history demand a complex knowledge of chemistry and materials and an extraordinary sensitivity to artistic intent, as well as physical dexterity, patience, and powers of concentration. Initial training, typically at one of a handful of institutions in North America, provides basic qualifications that must be supplemented with an extended period of specialized concentration on paintings, objects, textiles, antiquities, ethnic materials, photographs, prints and drawings, books and manuscripts, furniture, etc. Within a supervised environment, the young conservator develops the specific skills, the hands-on experience, and the confidence on which to base a future career.”

“The Kress Conservation Fellowships provide competitive grants to museums and other conservation facilities which sponsor supervised internships in the conservation of specific objects and onsite training.” This Fellowship has been supported by a grant from the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

For more information: http://www.kressfoundation.org/fellowships/conservation/

Our application was submitted with a proposed fellow, Tessa Gadomski, who recently graduated with a Master of Science in Art Conservation from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation, University of Delaware with a major in Library and Archives Materials. Along with this degree, she has also completed a Certificate of Advanced Study in Preservation from Simmons College, Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Tessa’s first day will be the 8^th of September, 2014.

Dartmouth Iconography Collection:

Acidic mat needing to be removed from water

color painting.

The primary focus for Tessa will be to address conservation needs of Rauner’s Iconography collection. This collection within Special Collections has over 1,300 cataloged items that include printed images, glass slides, original art on paper and other media, photographs, albums and digital files. There are documents that are part of the College Archives but it also includes several of the other collecting areas including the White Mountains, Daniel Webster and Robert Frost. A particularly significant subcategory of the collection is focused on the history of Polar exploration and the majority of its images relate to Dartmouth College and New Hampshire history. 

Dartmouth Iconography Collection:

Negatives of Dartmouth and New Hampshire needing rehousing 

and assessment.

Tessa will be at Dartmouth for a full year, concluding her Fellowship in August of 2015.

Written by Deborah Howe

Personnel Announcement

Michael Grant, a student of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts has begun a ten-week internship in Preservation Services.  Michael is pursuing a Masters in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation; in partial fulfillment of that degree he must complete three internships.  Over the course of the summer Michael will inventory and assess the condition of 16mm and 8mm films collected by the college in order to help Peter Carini, the College Archivist, determine which films should be added to the permanent collection of the College Archives.

Welcome Michael!

Personnel Announcement: Conservation Intern

Please welcome Lizzie Curran as the Preservation Services Summer Conservation Intern. Lizzie has completed one year in bookbinding at North Bennet Street School in Boston and is a graduate of Bennington College where she focused on visual arts, specifically drawing and painting.  While Lizzie is here for the next eight weeks she will focus her time learning about conservation practices within a library context and will explore a variety of conservation treatments. As a side, she grew up on a horse farm in Concord, Mass and loves avocados.

Deborah Howe

Collections Conservator

Conservation Internships

In 2007, Preservation Services established a rapport with what was then the conservation program at the University of Texas Kilgarlin Center for Study of the Cultural Record, by serving as an internship host site. These 9-month internships were designed to provide advanced conservation experience to third-year students in the program. In August of that year we were fortunate to host our first intern, Lauren Telepak. Hosting a student such as Lauren was a pleasure, as she had much to share from her studies and workshops. In exchange, we provided a working environment in which she could tangibly integrate her skills and knowledge. One of the activities Lauren participated in was the extensive staff orientation that is provided for new library staff. Lauren was exposed to many operations and departments she might not otherwise have known about. One of the many benefits of hosting interns, especially those from established programs, is the opportunity for us to learn new techniques and skills that are being taught in the programs.

Lauren showing re-moistenable tissue

Often conservation interns do not have any training or supervising experience, so we try to provide opportunities for the interns to work with our part-time students. Lauren was also able to teach in the Book Arts Workshop, which gave her some classroom teaching experience. Lauren is now the Collections Conservator for the Harvard College Library.

Lauren training a student to do circulating collections repair

Our second intern from the Texas program was Helen Bailey. Helen had a strong background in digital technology along with her interest in conservation. One of the options I like to offer our interns is the chance to explore new venues and potential interests other than just conservation. During Helen's time here, she took advantage of this opportunity by shadowing some of the librarians in other departments and spending some time on the reference desk. She also taught workshops for the Book Arts program and was the project coordinator for the redesign of our department web site. By the end of her internship, we had reorganized our department staff, which resulted in a new position that incorporated conservation knowledge and digital preservation development. I am pleased to say that Helen is still with us in this new position!

Helen Bailey

Summer Internships:

In 2008, while attending a party marking the closing of Aikos Japanese paper store in Chicago, Becky Saki, who had been the store manager there for five years and worked there for over fifteen years, came to me and said "Now what am I going to do?" I knew Becky had taken some conservation classes and that she was interested in learning more, so I said "Well maybe you can come up to Dartmouth for the summer and do a crash course in conservation," and with that, the kick-off for our summer internship program was established.

With a much shorter time frame to learn, it is more of a challenge to be diligent and structured in setting the outline for skills to learn. Becky was a quick study and was soon exploring more complex treatment beyond basic book repair. After Becky returned to Chicago, she was hired for a part time job at the Newberry Library working on a long term grant project and a part time position at the Ryerson Library at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she utilized many of the skills learned here. She has gone on to learn fine binding skills with Scott Kellar and had a book juried into the Chicago Public Library "One Book Many Interpretations" exhibit.

Becky Saki

The next summer we hosted Jill Iacchei who came to us with more of a book arts interest (unfortunately I don't have a photo of Jill). Jill had learned bookbinding more or less on her own, but had also sought out private lessons with Daniel Kelm in East Hampton MA. She was a Montessori teacher and wanted to change her career path. Having excellent listening skills and an eye for detail, she quickly picked up many of the conservation skills that were new to her. Pursuing her book arts interest, she applied and was accepted to the Iowa Book Arts Program. During this time she worked part-time in the conservation lab there. The Book Arts Program gives students a well-rounded education, from the history of book binding to the creation of fine books. This past year, she graduated and was hired for a one year fellowship in conservation at Stanford University.

In 2010 we entered into a relationship with North Bennet Street School to provide an official summer internship program for the book binding students.

Our first intern was McKey Berkman, who had a sound background of bookbinding experience. Students coming from North Bennet are exposed to traditional book binding as well as some conservation work. At the time she arrived, our College Archivist wanted to have some work done on the scrap book of Robert May, the creator of Ruldolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I thought this would make a perfect project for McKey that would provide a challenging and satisfying outcome. McKey has graduated and now has a studio space where she does private bookbinding and conservation work.

Mckey looking at the Robert May scrap book with College Archivist Peter Carini

Our second North Bennet intern, Arini Esarey, had already graduated when she came and had experience working in a conservation lab part-time as a student. While here, she was able to explore some of her more personal interests which included Islamic binding and color matching using different techniques. She went on to do an internship with London artist Su Blackwell and is now looking to spend time in Turkey researching book binding there.

Arini Esarey

Currently we are happy to host two interns at the same time, Lauren Schott, a first year student, and Becky Koch, a recent graduate.

Lauren Schott

Becky Koch

It has been a pleasure having two students here at the same time, as they are able to share what they have learned with each other. It also contributes to good conversation and group problem solving, and I am able to teach two people at once which makes my time more efficient. On a day-to-day basis I try to work with them individually as well as together, and have set up "touch base" meetings separately to be able to address their individual interests and focuses.

All in all, I find it a great and satisfying activity to host interns. It is an all-around win-win dynamic as we are able to complete a significant amount of work and move ahead on special projects and batch treatments. In return, the interns are exposed to a practical, working conservation environment and become more versed in conservation treatment options. I try to give each intern a special project so that they have at least one new show piece for their portfolio. We also provide a context in which conservation and preservation exists within the library and college environment, and help the interns learn more about this by setting up meetings with heads of departments, the Dean of Libraries, and an in depth tour of special collections. It also is very fulfilling to see how each of our interns finds their own individual way into the field either in preservation, book arts or both.

Written by Deborah Howe.

Guest Post: A Final Internship Experiment

This is the final guest post from our intern and North Bennet Street School graduate, Arini Esarey. Her last project in Preservation Services was an experiment with a new technique for creating a conservation-friendly leather substitute to be used in bookbinding and repair. Our thanks to Arini for her excellent work and positive energy in the lab over the last few months, and best wishes to her as she leaves us for new adventures in the book arts. To contact Arini or learn more about her work, please visit her website.

The following experiment is based on the technique described by Grace Owen and Sarah Reidell in their presentation at the 2010 American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works Annual Meeting in Milwaukee, Synthetic Leather for Book Repair: Experimenting with Cast Composites. In this activity I am not attempting to match existing leather for a specific book repair, but am merely curious to see how the technique works.

Materials

• Japanese tissue (Hiromi Paper; HP-10B Kaji Natural, 24.5 x 39 inches, 26 g/m2, kozo fibers)
• Acrylic Paint (Golden Fluid Acrylics in Burnt Sienna)
• Silicone mold made from an existing piece of leather or cloth. (The one I used was already made by others in the lab. Owen and Reidell suggest a Room Temperature Vulcanizing (RTV) silicone mold kit available at art stores.)

Round 1
Undiluted acrylic paint was brushed lightly onto the silicone mold. Care was taken to apply as light a coat as possible while still achieving an even, opaque coat. Even so, not all brush strokes were eliminated, as you can see in the samples. Then Japanese tissue was laid over the mold and tamped down with a stiff brush. The tissue was left on until dry and then peeled away.

Sample 1: dry tissue
Sample 2: tissue dampened with water before application to mold
Sample 3: tissue dampened with Methyl Cellulose before application to mold

Round 2
In this trial, the acrylic paint was mixed with Methyl Cellulose before application (in a roughly 60/40 water to MC ratio).

Sample 4: dry tissue
Sample 5: dampened with water before application to mold
Sample 6: dampened with Methyl Cellulose before application to mold

Of the six samples, numbers two and three show the most promise for use in leather or cloth repair. Sample two has the most even application of color and texture with no signs of brush strokes. Sample three could be useful if the tissue is toned beforehand with a wash of light acrylic paint to add depth and richness of color to the final result.

Round 3
In this round, undiluted acrylic paint was dabbed onto the silicone mold using a piece of cheesecloth. The tissue was left to dry, then given a layer of Methyl Cellulose before putting the tissue onto the mold. After removing the tissue from the mold, half of the surface was given a bit of SC6000 and Klucel-g to mimic the treatment one might give in a repair treatment. Then, on the lower portion of the sample I under-painted a layer of black and burnt sienna to see how that would alter the appearance of the tissue.

Sample 7: tissue brushed with thin wash of burnt sienna, raw sienna, and water

Detail view of the sample with toned tissue, under-painting, and SC-6000/Klucel-G mix

Round 4
This time, I combined the elements I liked best to use for covering a scrap piece of board.

1. Toned tissue with thin wash of burnt and raw sienna, let dry
2. Dampened with methyl cellulose
3. Applied undiluted acrylic paint into silicone mold using cheesecloth
4. Under-painted the tissue with black and burnt sienna
5. When dried, applied to piece of board with PVA
6. Then, SC-6000 and Klucel-G applied to tissue

In the end, I’m pleased with the results of Round 4.

When attempting to match tissue to an existing piece of leather or cloth, the under-painting step may not be necessary, depending on what colors you use for the color wash and mold. In this demo, I liked the richness that layer of paint gave, even if it did add an extra step to the process.

This cast composite technique was introduced to me by Helen Bailey at the Dartmouth conservation lab in Preservation Services and Henry Hebert, currently a second year student at North Bennet Street School. Thanks to Stephanie Wolff for her guidance and support in the lab while working with this technique.

Thanks, Dartmouth Preservation Services for the chance to learn, experiment, and participate in the book conservation field. The internship was wonderful!

Written by Arini Esarey

Guest Post from Intern Arini Esary

Hello, this is Arini Esarey, the current book conservation intern from North Bennet Street School. I graduated from North Bennet in June and am thrilled to have these several months at Dartmouth to practice what I’ve learned in school and learn new treatments. One of the many interesting things about this lab is that Deborah and Stephanie got their bookbinding and conservation training from places other than North Bennet, so some of their methods are slightly different than what I learned. Perfect! That’s exactly what I hoped to find by studying with different people after finishing school.

Recently, Deborah and I sat down and talked about the course of the internship; what I have already completed and what lies ahead. There’s been immense freedom here to work on projects of personal interest and I’m so grateful for that. We made a two-page list of treatments to get through and are steadily checking them off. They range from basic to complex repairs of items from General Collections and Special Collections. To list a sampling: pamphlet resewing, Japanese tissue hinge repairs, spine repairs, board tacketing, production/batch work, paper deacidification, Ultrasonic encapsulation, disbinding books, and housing unusual items.

Some of the more memorable projects I’ve worked on have been treating a brittle volume of A Parody on Iolanthe; a printers proof copy of Indiana Home, written by a distant relative of mine, Logan Esarey (that was a thrill to run across); disbinding volumes of early 19th Century Medical Theses from the Dartmouth Medical School; housing a splinter of a wooden goalpost from the 1935 Dartmouth vs. Yale football game; and more recently, a set of cloth rebacks repaired using the method Todd Pattison detailed in his presentation at the Guild of Book Workers Standards of Excellence Seminar.

A Parody on Iolanthe
Some of the pages were very brittle and others were not, so we decided to deacidify all pages, encapsulate the brittle ones, and leave loose the others. I rebound the book in its original boards with some modifications to account for the larger size of the encapsulated pages.

Cloth Rebacks
Pattison’s technique is interesting because the original spine pieces are torn off, rather than cut. This helps to make a more seamless, subtle repair. The outermost layer of Japanese tissue is toned on the book with acrylics to get a perfect color match. Doing these four in quick succession got me over my fear of coloring on the book and I quite like it now.

Medical Theses
Some of the handwritten scripts in the medical theses are gorgeous. Aren’t the title flourishes beautiful?! I’m a little bit jealous that they could hand write such short theses (they are anywhere from 2-20 pages) with no citations or references. Stephanie found one today that even included a postscript. Oh, how times have changed.

I should mention that in addition to conservation work this internship includes individual meetings with staff from different departments and tours of departments and libraries on campus. As much as I do love bench work, it’s been valuable to step away and see how conservation work fits into the larger scope of the library. For example, I’ve sat in on meetings with Special Collections to determine treatment plans for items in the library and met with others to learn how Preservation Services fits into the current digitization projects.

We’ve also had special guests come to us. Malcolm Summers gave us a daylong tutorial on gold tooling and Anna Embree spent a few days with us showing us conservation tricks, how to repair our board shears, and general shop talk. There has been a great sense of community here in the department, the library as a whole, and region. My time here has been filled with bench work, hands-on demonstrations, lively discussions, and good music. Thanks everyone.

Written by Arini Esarey

Personnel News: Arini Esarey

Preservation Services welcomes Arini Esarey, a recent graduate from North Bennet Street School. She has completed 2 years of bookbinding classes and will serve a 3-month internship to learn more about preservation in the context of libraries and to practice conservation techniques learned at school.

Arini has also worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Graduate School of Design Library at Harvard. One of her bindings is included in the One Book One Chicago exhibit, on view at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago through April 2012.

Welcome!

Rudolph Gets a Makeover

In the summer of 2010 McKey Berkman, the Conservation Intern from North Bennet Street School in Boston, took on the daunting task of conserving Robert May’s scrapbook which details the events and promotion surrounding Rudolph’s destined fame.

“In the spring of 2010, Dartmouth College Archivist Peter Carini discovered an uncataloged scrapbook in the Robert Lewis May Collection housed in Rauner Library. May, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the class of 1926, was the creator of the iconic Christmas tale Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The library holds copies of the original soft-cover book issued in 1939, mock-ups and manuscripts of the book, as well as subsequent printings and adaptations of Rudolph, Rudolph merchandise, and other children’s books by May. The newly discovered scrapbook is a significant addition to the collection, as its 54 pages chronicle the creation and success of Rudolph as a brilliant marketing scheme for Montgomery Ward, where May was a copywriter in the advertising department. “ McKey Berkman.

For a more detailed description of the history of the scrapbook and McKey’s conservation treatment please click here.

(Photo: Peter Carini and McKey Berkman with the May scrapbook.)

McKey Berkman: Conservation Intern

In the late spring Deborah Howe contacted the head of the book binding program at North Bennet Street School in Boston to explore the possibility of summer interns from NBSS working in Preservation Services. I'm happy to announce that our first NBSS intern, McKey Berkman, has been busy at work in the conservation since June.

McKey has finished the first year of the two year NBSS program and in our conservation lab is learning to put theory into practice. In her short time here she has learned treatment assessment, a variety of spine repairs, and developed skills in production oriented conservation.

McKey's last day is August 20.

(By the way, if you marveled at the peonies from Maxine's party, they were from McKey's garden!)

Farewell, Helen!

Helen Bailey is leaving us today. She has worked in Preservation Services since September 2009 when she began her internship as part of the University of Texas library school program. While she was here Helen was in charge of two very important projects: the department web page redesign, and our celebration of "Preservation Week". In the last three days of her internship she installed the exhibit for the winners of the Book Arts Prize and is developed an on-line version as well. Busy, busy, busy!

So long and best wishes!