By Lucy Vilankulu
When I was a kid, I was really hard on books. Aside from my mania for reading and re-reading every-thing within my grasp, I also scribbled in them, read them in the bathtub and—most appallingly—used the smooth paperbacks to “skate” around the carpet of my bedroom.
All of this, of course, took a toll on the books. As the spines gave way and the paper covers tore off, my mother patched them back up with brown gaffer’s tape. The repairs bought them many more years, and some of the relics from my childhood remain in my personal collection.
If only the preservation and conservation of the University of Minnesota Libraries’ books could be as easily effected with an eraser and some gaffer’s tape. The care of the University’s holdings is carried out differently depending on whether items reside in the general collections on the open shelves or in Archives and Special Collections; each collection has specific goals and different techniques for achieving those goals.
When I visited Collection Support and Preservation manager Karl Isely in his Wilson Library workshop, he showed me two books—La Rêve by Emile Zola and La Colonisation du Nord de L’Afrique by Aristide Guil-bert—and asked me which one was older. Not being strong on French authors, I went entirely by the appear-ance of the books. While La Colonisation looked pretty sturdy, La Rêve had parted from its fake-marble cover and was flaking apart faster than a piping hot brioche. Wrong! La Rêve was published in 1905, while Guilbert’s paean to French imperialism was printed on rag paper in 1844. It looked like it could have come off the presses this year. What could account for the difference?
Well, we have to go back to the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which is when many of the general collection books were published. As rising literacy rates in America and Europe created a demand for more books, publishers abandoned the time-honored method of making rag paper (paper made from linen and cot-ton) in favor of wood pulp paper. Wood pulp paper was a good deal cheaper, but unbeknownst to producers and publishers, the high acid content of this paper made it vulnerable to yellowing, cracking, and flaking. By 1844 nearly all books were printed on high-acid wood pulp paper and over the decades the quality of the pulp de-creased with the price. Whether or not the switch to pulp paper put rag men out of business, it did make books cheaper to produce and purchase. But this access came at a price; by the 1930s librarians had noticed the dete-rioration of acidic paper in their collections.
Isely and his small band of preservation workers have the gargantuan task of triaging, repairing, and preserving the library’s alarmingly large number of damaged and at-risk books. Today most books are printed on acid-neutral paper, but there are still the masses of books that were published during the reign of acidic paper. In 1998, the University Libraries did a study of millions of volumes in the general collection and found that, on average, 78% of the books reviewed were “acidic” and approximately 30% were brittle and damaged. At first glance the worst news seems to be the number of books already damaged, but the really chilling number is that 78% next to “acidic.”
These book “patients” are heaped around Isely’s office on shelves and trucks, mutely awaiting their moment with the glue-pot or a transfer to the bindery. “With our general circulation collection,” says Karl Isely, “the priority is to preserve the intellectual content by whatever means necessary.” While 50% of the books that come to Isely’s office are declared fit for re-binding, the other 50% of the books are withdrawn from the col-lection after the book has been replaced by a reprint or later edition, or as a last resort, a bound photocopy.
Microfilming brittle books was once the preferred method of preserving intellectual content, but the popular-ity of microfilm is waning with the exciting possibilities of digitization. The University of Minnesota is one of the thirteen Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) universities (“Big 10” plus University of Chicago) partnering with Google on digitizing up to 10 million volumes from these collections. When the news of the partnership was released in June 2007, University Librarian Wendy Pradt Lougee pointed out that: “Through Google, individuals will be able to search every word in millions of books. Researchers will be able to conduct in-depth searches and make connections across works that would have taken weeks—or even years—to make in the past.” Part of the CIC agreement is to feature “Collections of Distinction”: collections that are strong specialties of a given university. The University of Minnesota, for example, is nominating its collection of Scandinavian history and literature, its forestry research collections and its entomology (specifically bee-keeping) materials for status as Collections of Distinction.
While the preservation focus in the general collection is on saving the content, the aim in Special Collections is also about the care of the book or other item—usually something quite rare and valuable — as an artifact. The University Libraries do both preservation and conservation work with these special collections, Director of Archives and Special Collections Kris Kiesling tells me. “With preservation,” says Kiesling, “we are concerned with maintaining the proper environmental conditions for materials. In Andersen Library’s caverns, where these collections are stored, the temperature is cold, it’s dark and the humidity is constant, and materi-als are housed in acid-free folders and acid-free boxes. Conservation, on the other hand, provides treatment of some kind of rare artifact, like a rare book or a valuable document.”
Because the University does not have the facilities for such treatment and repairs, materials like the ones Ki-esling mentions get sent out to private conservators on a contract basis. Andersen Library and the caverns below, the home of Archives and Special Collections, has recently sent two architectural drawings for conservation treatment to the Midwest Art Conservation Center. “One of them is a drawing by John Howe [an architect who worked with Frank Lloyd Wright] ,” says Alan Lathrop of the Manuscripts Division, “and the other is a drawing for the facade elevation of Landmark Center (formerly, Old Federal Courts Building), St. Paul. The Howe drawing had a portion of it cut off from the rest of the drawing and the work involved hinging the two pieces to make a whole. The Landmark Center drawing was torn down the middle and needed to be patched to-gether.”
Sometimes conservation is about improving access as well as protecting materials. Dr. Marguerite Ragnow, the curator of the James Ford Bell Library, describes a special project they undertook last year to have a special frame and container system created for their 1507 Waldseemüller map—the “Map that Named America.” “We wanted scholars to be able to study the paper and the watermark on this map, so the enclosure had to be see-through, but we also wanted to protect the map from damage, as well as be able to display it and present it to classes conveniently. The old container was a plastic sleeve resting inside a 50 lb. wood clamshell case–not so good. The new system involved encasing the map between two sheets of special conservation-quality plexiglass that were then sealed around the edges. A two-part frame was then constructed for it, so that one could place the plex-enclosed map into the base of the frame and then set the facing piece of the frame on top, held on by magnets. The entire framed piece then rests in a cloth-covered conservation-quality cardboard clamshell box.”
Reflecting on Minnesota’s Past
While the University of Minnesota Libraries prepare for the book digitization project with Google and the other Big 10 Universities, they are also partnering with the Minnesota Digital Library, a project to create a digital collection of resources and materials specific to the state of Minnesota. The coalition of professionals from libraries, archives, historical societies, and museums all over Minnesota has already completed its first ambitious project. Minnesota Reflections, which can be accessed at http://reflections.mndigital.org, is a collection of over 20,000 images and documents related to Minnesota, mostly before 1909. Minnesota Reflections is searchable and can be browsed by topic, region, and collection. The collection items, which were contributed by over 75 cultural organizations in Minnesota, include images from The Barr Library’s State Board of Health Reports for the years of 1872–1882, photos from the North Star Museum of Boy Scouting and Girl Scouting, the archives of Carleton College, and many other representations of Minnesota history.
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