I had the pleasure of visiting Washi no Sato, a papermaking park, near Higashi Chichibu in the Saitama prefecture just outside of Tokyo at the end of April. The staff demonstrates traditional paper-making skills and lets visitors make their own sheet of paper and decorate it with leaves and flowers. They also make large sheets of paper which are fairly heavy and used for wrapping papers. When we visited they weren’t in full production mode, but I got some photos of their equipment and videos of one of their papermakers in action.
The UCLA Library Preservation Department is offering a conservation pre-program internship for qualified students who are applying for Masters-level training in conservation. This internship will provide experience to pre-program students or individuals currently in graduate level conservation programs in conservation decision making, treatment and documentation for library and archival collections. The conservation intern will work under the supervision of the collections conservator to perform repair or make enclosures for materials selected from the collections. Relevant literature will be reviewed prior to conservation treatment and all projects will be documented.
Application deadline is May 7, 2013.
Imagine opening a box to find this in your collection! Untangle as much as you can and then try to wind it back on the core.
Contributed by NYU Libraries Media Preservation Unit’s Preservation Lab Manager Ben Moskowitz.
Media falls off of cores–it’s the worst. You spend all that time and effort to get that perfect wind just to lose it when you take the reel apart. Back in my film school days, when I edited on Steenbeck in a little dark room that reeked of mold and stale cigarettes, I was taught to always pack two things with me: a bottle of aspirin, and a 1” core. The aspirin was self-explanatory. The 1” core was for when film became de-cored from its 2” core, which happens. A lot.
Different sizes of film cores.
If the core falls out in anyway, you remove the core completely. There is no sense in trying to put it back on–you can’t unscramble an egg. The next step is to place the 1” core in the hole left by the 2” core. From there you can simply wind the film onto the smaller core. Easy.
Well that works fine and dandy for film, where small cores are viable. But what do you do when your ¼” audiotape falls off its core? There is only one size ¼” audio core. However, there are 8mm cores, which can be a makeshift substitute. Follow the same process as film: place the 8mm core in the hole where the ¼” core used to be. Once you have re-cored the ¼” audiotape to the 8mm core, you simply place it all on a split reel and wind the tape back onto a proper ¼” audiotape reel and no one will know the difference.
The finished product after hand winding the de-cored reel.
At the end of June, I left the humid cornfields of Iowa and headed west to spend the summer in sunny southern California. It is now almost September as I sit to reflect upon the past eight weeks that I have spent as an intern at the UCLA Library Conservation Center (LCC). The past two months have gone by quickly, but they have been an invaluable experience for me as I continue to look towards future graduate level study in conservation.
The UCLA Library Preservation Department is offering a conservation pre-program internship for qualified students who are applying for Masters-level training in conservation. This internship will provide experience to pre-program students or individuals currently in graduate level conservation programs in conservation decision making, treatment and documentation for library and archival collections. The conservation intern will work under the supervision of the collections conservator to perform repair or make enclosures for materials selected from the collections. Relevant literature will be reviewed prior to conservation treatment and all projects will be documented.
Post by Caitlyn McLoughlin
While I am not a MLIS student, I am most definitely a student of the library, and this project has been a rewarding lesson. Because I’m one of those lucky dorks who loves her job more than most things, I jumped at the opportunity to increase my hours as a Conservation Lab assistant this past summer. My increased presence in the lab inspired my supervisors, Wil Lin and Kristen St. John, to ask around the UCLA library community for potential projects that could be completed over the summer. Enter Janine Henri, Architecture, Design, and Digital Services Librarian. She explained that there were a number of books in the Arts Library Cage stacks that needed to be transferred to SRLF for permanent housing. But before this could happen, enclosures needed to be created for the books – which were not just books, but GIANT books. The average book measures around 20” x 14” and weighs somewhere between 10 – 12 lbs.
Looking back on my experience with the UCLA Library Conservation Center is extremely rewarding. My first day, Kristen St. John and I sat down and discussed the different projects I’d be able to work on this summer and what I was most interested in. I’m glad to have been able to accomplish such a wide range of activities in the eight weeks I’ve been here with a focus on hand skills and condition survey.
During a visit to the Performing Arts Special Collections my friend and colleague Peggy Alexander moved some files including a set of Adams Family musical greeting cards and remarked “these poor things don’t sound so good anymore.” She opened one and it started to play a loop of jumbled finger snaps and low percussive noises. I happen to have some obscure knowledge of these, so I volunteered to try to fix it. In this case, it was simply that the battery housing was misshapen, so the fix was simply to compress it back into contact with the battery and exercise the pull tab to make sure it made a good connection. It is possible to actually open these cards up to replace the batteries, re-solder wires, or fix broken pull tabs, but happily no such intervention was required in this instance.
I had the chance to take a quick trip to London and Barcelona last week, largely for vacation, but wanted to share a few images that caught my eye for preservation reasons.
This is a wide shot of the Palau de la Musica Catalana, a beautiful Modernisme concert hall in Barcelona. I don’t know all the reasons for the modern-not-modernisme addition of the glassed-over facade. It could be environmental control, protection from pollutants and city life, sound-proofing, or maybe a few of those together.
Yesterday on the ALA/ALCTS email discussion group PADG Beth Doyle announced a new grant to support travel for people wanting to attend the ALA Annual Meeting (the full text of her announcement is after the break). In my opinion two things make this a special award. It honors Jan Merrill-Oldham who has contributed so much to the field of preservation – a sense of her accomplishments is given in Beth’s announcement. When she received the Ross Atkinson Lifetime Achievement Award in February of this year, ALA News summarized her career here. It’s also remarkable that the award is directed to newcomers to preservation at all levels – professional, paraprofessional or student. So appropriate given Jan Merrill Oldham’s support of so many entering the field over the years. Thanks are due to Beth Doyle, Heather Caldwell and Hilary Seo for coordinating the establishment of this award and LBI and Hollinger Metal Edge, Inc for making it possible.
