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 village is located in a beautiful valley with a river running through it – necessary for papermaking sites. Paper made here is from kozo, a plant in the mulberry family which is also found in this area.

The building above is the Hosokawa papermaking house, a reconstruction or restoration of a traditional house that includes a work area for beating, soaking, and sorting the kozo fiber used in paper making. It also has a beautiful thatched roof:

 As you enter to the right you see tables used for beating the fiber:

Here’s a close up of the beating tools:

A vat for soaking and cleaning the kozo fibers:

It’s quite dark and must have been cold in the winter when this work would have been done. But the hearth was just opposite the soaking vat would have provided warmth. This may have also been used for cooking the fiber but I’m not sure.

The current papermaking area is in an open, modern building which has plenty of room for tours as well as papermaking. This view is from the far end looking toward the entrance.

As you enter you see the natural materials used for making paper with kozo branches from the mulberry tree and to the right the branches partially stripped for their inner bark, the part of the tree used in papermaking.

Close up of the kozo branches both before and after the outer bark layer has been stripped away:

In the bowl is tororo-aoi which is a formation aid used to thicken and condition the water in sheet making:

Outside is a vat for soaking and sun bleaching the kozo fiber:

Inside are two beaters:

Here are two vats with screens:

Extra screens and frames:

Sheet formation – these are stills from a video I shot. Screens are locked into a frame and suspended above the vat with pullies. The papermaker dips the screen in the vat several times. He ripples the water/pulp mixture over the screen repeatedly:

Couching the paper: Next he unlocks the screen from the frame and removes the screen. He then aligns it with the stack and folds the screen down so it is resting on the stack:

Press for removing excess water from a stack of newly formed sheets:

Paper drying on heated metal boards:

Removing paper from the drying boards:

Further drying of sheets of paper:

Samples of the paper for sale in the front of the new workshop:

As additional incentive to visit, there’s a restaurant on site that serves delicious soba noodles and tempura. And there must be great trails in this beautiful area, as we rode the bus back into Ogawamachi hikers got on at every stop.

A view of the front of the park:

Logistics: If using public transportation from Tokyo, take the Tobu Tojo Line to the Ogawamachi Station (from Tokyo’s Ikebukuro Station an express is just over an hour). A regularly scheduled local bus goes from Ogawamachi Station out to the papermaking park. I’m not sure how frequently, but there was one waiting when our train came in. There are other buses in front of the train station, so confirm with the driver you’re on the right one.

Other resources on papermaking in Japan:

The classic text on Japanese paper in English is Tim Barrett’s Japanese Papermaking: Traditions, Tools, and Techniques. New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1983 (paperback editions are available too).

Various tours of papermaking sites in Japan are offered from time to time by different groups. Hiromi Paper in Santa Monica has offered multi-day washi tours of Japan that sound excellent. Accounts of past tours can be found on their blog: http://hiromipaper.wordpress.com/category/washi-tour/

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.

The UCLA Library Preservation Department supports the Library’s mission to develop, organize, and preserve collections for optimal use. The Preservation Department provides stewardship for the intellectual record in the formats required by contemporary scholars and ensures the safekeeping of the artifacts that are entrusted to the UCLA Library. The Preservation Department includes the Library Conservation Center (LCC), a state-of-the-art conservation lab that provides conservation services collections in all units of the UCLA Library. The LCC is guided by the best current practices of the book and paper conservation field and the Code of Ethics of the American Institute for the Conservation of Artistic and Historic works.
For examples of preservation department activities, visit:

http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/preservation

These internships are 75% FTE (30 hours/week) for an eight week period, with a flexible start date from July 1 to September 16.
Interns will be hired as Limited Appointment employees, with an hourly salary rate of $14.32 and will be eligible for UCLA Core level benefits.
Please submit a letter of interest, a current resume, and contact information for three professional references to:
Kristen St.John
Collections Conservator
UCLA Library Conservation Center
Box 957230, 11000 Kinross Ave., #126
Los Angeles, CA 90095-7230
Electronic applications are also accepted – please send to: kstjohn[at]library.ucla.edu
Application deadline is May 7, 2013

Books absorb water and expand.

On Tuesday, March 19, I volunteered at the water salvage workshop put together by LAPNet (Los Angeles Area Preservation Network) and hosted by the University of Southern California. Julie Page of the California Preservation Program (CPP) and the Western States and Territories Preservation Assistance Service (WESTPAS) led the workshop. Thirty-six professionals from libraries and archives from around southern California (including two UCLA Librarians – shouts out to Susan and Diane) assembled at the gorgeous Doheny Library for an afternoon, to absorb Julie’s extensive disaster preparedness knowledge. Following a brief presentation about essential disaster prep tools, the crowd, along with several of us LAPNet steering committee members, reassembled in the courtyard to get our hands on a wide assortment of materials, and perform rescue procedures.

Earlier that morning, Julie had put together trays of water that she liberally stocked with archival materials of all types. She had collected black & white photographs on both resin-coated and fiber stock; color photos; colored paper; standard office files stuffed with typical photocopies and laser prints; blueprint materials; large colorful maps (that I was sorely tempted to rescue); black & white negatives; color slide positives in both paper and glass carriers; brittle old scrapbook pages with newspaper clippings (note: these come loose in water); colored paper of various vintages; and glossy magazine paper.

Many types of material often found in archives were soaked in bins of water to provide experience with drying them.

Handi-Wipes and plastic straws are useful tools for dealing with water damaged materials.

Absorbent materials used in water salvage include Handi-Wipes, Reemay, non-fusible interfacing, and watercolor paper.

In addition to these wide trays, Julie had placed a variety of books upright in several inches of water in larger plastic containers. The books rapidly absorbed the water and expanded, filling up the initial inch or so of open space to either side. She’d also put together a metal shelf and loosely populated it with books which she doused with water from above. These too plumped with the moisture, making them difficult to unshelve by midday.

Waterlogged colored paper leaches dye onto its neighbors.

Following her lecture, workshop participants got to experience interleaving the books with paper towels, propping them with pages fanned open, and using plastic straws to lightly lift the boards to permit airflow. Another interesting technique involved using Velobind combs to gently keep pages open and stabilized in case of any breeze.

Sheets of mylar are used to safely lift documents out of the water.

We used sheets of mylar to carefully retrieve, using water tension, documents floating in the wide trays. Dispersing the wet pages across the provided tables on paper towels, we were able to successfully dry our sample materials. Some participant groups were positioned at tables that were unfortunately situated in the full afternoon sun, which caused rippling in the paper of their items as they dried. My table happened to enjoy a shady spot, and our materials seemed to dry more smoothly.

Books that are not too soaked through can be propped up on end with their pages fanned open to permit airflow.

In addition to shade, we learned that a salvage effort will require far more tables than you’d imagine. One estimate is that a standard archival box containing approximately one cubic foot of material will require up to 30 six foot long tables of drying space.

I highly recommend participating in a workshop like this if you can. Even better, Julie suggests helping out someone else’s library or archive recover from their water emergency. You gain direct, hands-on knowledge of how different materials react to submersion – and your colleagues will definitely appreciate the help.

–Dawn Aveline, Preservation Specialist.

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.

Wayne at an exhibition in the 1950s.

Visual artist June Claire Wayne was born on March 7, 1918 in Chicago, Illinois, where she was raised by her divorced mother, Dorothy Alice Kline. At age 15, Wayne dropped out of high school to pursue a career as an artist. By 1938 she had achieved prominence among world-famous writers, actors, artists, and scientists in an international milieu.

When WWII ended, Wayne left Chicago to settle in Los Angeles, where she became an integral part of the California art scene. Inspired by her training in production illustration, Wayne began to produce seminal works of optical art, including The Tunnel and the Kafka series, in the mid 1940s. She continued to expand her artistic horizons, taking up lithography at Lynton Kistler’s facility in 1947. Ten years later, she began collaborating with master printer Marcel Durassier in Paris. In their groundbreaking work on the John Donne suite, Wayne invented many of lithography’s current techniques, vastly expanding the aesthetic potential of the medium. In order to restore the art of lithography in the United States, she founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop with the support of the Ford Foundation in 1960. Now known as the Tamarind Institute of the University of New Mexico, this organization continues to thrive and help artists become free enterprise workers in the print world.

The collection at the UCLA Library consists of June Wayne’s personal and professional correspondence and documents pertaining to her career as a painter, lithographer, weaver, writer and political and civil activist. Through the Arcadia fund, UCLA Library Preservation Unit has recently undertaken the digitization of many of the rare audiovisual materials in the collection. The contents of these vary, including audio recordings of the Joan of Art seminar series, audio “letters” from June Wayne to Mary Baskett (author of The Art of June Wayne in 1969), home movies, documentation of exhibitions, and many other lectures and interviews of Wayne throughout her career. There is still much work to be done, but eventually the digitized files will be available to researchers through the UCLA Library Digital Collections program.

June Wayne passed away on August 23, 2011 in Los Angeles.

This audio clip is of June Wayne speaking at one of the Joan of Art Seminars in 1972. The original item is held by the UCLA Library’s Special Collections and was reformatted for preservation through the Arcadia fund. Click the following: JoanofArtClip72

<<Siobhan Hagan, Audiovisual Preservation Specialist

A special report from Conservation Technician Wil Lin.

A scanned etching of Winchester Cathedral from “Views of the Cathedral and Churches of Wales, with Descriptions” by John Chessell Buckler, London : John Nichols and Son, 1822.

At the Library Conservation Center we regularly receive mutilated library materials–their incompleteness often the result of vandalism or theft.  Such damage can range anywhere from a few missing leaves to entire chapters razored out of books. The former is easy to remedy with simple page replacements, but the loss or damage in the latter case can be so extensive as to make replacement or repair no longer viable.

But what happens when a book is deigned too rare or unique by staff librarians to be discarded outright, especially when losses from vandalism are extensive?   Such is the case of Views of the Cathedral Churches of England and Wales with Descriptions, by John Chessell Buckler; London, John Nicols and son, 1822.  The book is printed on flexible, heavy rag paper, and most notably, it includes 32 beautifully etched plates by Buckler’s father, artist and architect John Buckler, of various landmark gothic churches of the time.

Two views of the unhappy book.

The UCLA copy not only has severe damage to its binding, but it is also missing 17 of the 32 plates.  Judging from the quality and aesthetic appeal of the remaining plates, it’s easy to see why someone might have coveted these etchings and wanted them for himself.   The fact that this book was shelved in YRL’s open stacks made the book all the more vulnerable to vandals.  A quick search in WorldCat yielded only two library copies in the United States, with a copy each at Stanford and NYPL.  As badly damaged as the UCLA copy was, we decided that it might be worthwhile to attempt procuring replacement pages through interlibrary loans in order to repair the book.

Knowing the book’s rarity we expected, at most, scanned PDFs via ILL document delivery from either Stanford or NYPL.  It was nearly a year after we submitted the initial loan request when received news from our Interlibrary Loans department that they are able to secured a loan for the physical copy from Stanford’s Special Collections.  The loan was approved with the strict understanding that the Stanford copy would be lent to the Library Conservation Center for the explicit purpose of scanning and printing replacements for the damaged UCLA copy.

The arrival of the Stanford copy was a great relief, as it is the same edition as the UCLA copy, complete with all of the etched plates, though it is in a different binding and its fore and tail edges have been trimmed less aggressively than the UCLA binding so it is slightly larger (see image). To minimize over-stressing the binding of the Stanford copy in the scanning process, we contacted Pete Lacson at the Preservation Imaging department at the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF) to make arrangements for high-resolution overhead scanning with their Digibook Suprascan II Scanner, where the book can lie face-up comfortably in a cradle while it is being scanned.

The Stanford copy (left), and the UCLA copy (right).

We flagged all the plates that we needed and delivered the book to the SRLF, and shortly thereafter received a DVD containing high-resolution Tiff files of all the missing plates.  To prepare the images for printing, we custom cut 11 x 17” sheets of archival paper, chosen for roughly the same shade and weight as the book’s original pages.  We then utilized Microsoft Word to import and re-size all the images to the correct dimensions, and reprinted them using our Lanier photocopier. Each of the printed replacements was trimmed down to the size of the rest of the book’s pages.

Before the missing plates could be incorporated back into the text block, the original binding was disassembled, with the original damaged case discarded and the text block broken down into loose, un-sewn signatures.  Locations of missing plates were flagged—and the loose conjugate leaf found on the opposite side within the same signature was identified. After each replacement page was guarded to its conjugate, the loose signatures were then re-sewn, glued and rebound with a new case.

Sewing the the textblock back together, with the replacement pages already incorporated.

With the repair/binding now complete, the book requires additional cataloging—not only to transfer the book from the open stacks of YRL to SRLF to prevent future vandalism, but also to enumerate all the replacements in the bibliographic record as recommended by Arts Librarian Janine Henri, to help inform library patrons that some of the etched plates are, in fact, replacements.  With the cataloging assistance of Sara Layne from the Cataloging and Metadata Center, the book now appears in the UCLA Library Catalog as a non-circulating item stored at the SRLF, available by request at Special Collections with all of the facsimile reproductions within the book listed in the “physical description” field.

The repaired book, open to the spread with the replaced etching of Winchester Cathedral as seen above.

With “Views of the Cathedral Churches of England and Wales” now safely housed in the non-circulating storage areas at the SRLF,  we reflect on the fact that few vandalized books can or will ever receive this kind of attention, especially those that are shelved in the open stacks and don’t have “Views of the Cathedral Churches of England and Wale’s” aesthetic or artifactual appeal.  Ironically it was also the book’s appeal that made it such an attractive target to vandals.

Many more mutilated books remain in the open stacks of UCLA’s libraries, and many more still may still be vulnerable to future vandalism.  We not only depend on library patrons to continue to respect the physical integrity of our collections, but also to help us discover materials that are already damaged.  Here’s something every library patron can do to help the Library Conservation Center intervene in vandalism cases: just bring damaged material to the circulation desk at YRL, Arts, Music, College, EMS, or any one of many branch libraries on the UCLA campus—it’s the best and easiest these books will find their way to us.

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.

In my initial conversation with Kristen, I expressed interest in focusing my time on treatment documentation and works on paper. I wanted to learn how to properly record pre and post treatments so that a useful reference, that could be read an understood by someone other than myself, resulted. Specifically, I wanted to attend to organization, accurate terminology, clear descriptions, and photo-documentation. My interest in paper is rooted in observations from previous experience. Papers of different regions and time periods present their own unique conservation challenges due to substrate fiber, method of manufacture, and media used. I wanted to begin building familiarity with the distinct qualities and characteristics of each and how these differences direct treatment decisions. As the summer unfolded three projects overlapped these interests:

The Minasian Collection:

A collection of Arabic, Armenian, and Persian manuscripts dating primarily from the 14th-17th centuries, the Minasian collection is quite diverse. The papers I worked with represented a variety of sizes, materials, and mediums: heavy western papers, thin tissue, cloth, wove, laid, and burnished papers, printed, water colored, and handwritten documents. All exhibited varying levels of damage ranging from folds and creases to minor tears and large loses. The paper and the method of inscription and decoration directed my decisions on humidification and mending options. I found the history behind these documents most compelling. Jonathan M. Bloom’s Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of paper in the Islamic World was a great resource for historical reference.

The Rouse Collection:

The Rouse Collection consists of manuscript leaves from the 9th -16th centuries from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and England. This is an ongoing rehousing project begun in the summer of 2009. The manuscripts are used by classes and handled often. For this reason, the page structure was designed to both offer protection and allow for the removal of items. A previous intern, Oriana Calman, devised an album sleeve format that would allow for this initiative. Douglas MacLennan, the 2010 intern, provides a very thorough overview of this project (http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/preservation/2011/03/14/douglas-maclennan-2010-summer-conservation-internship-report/#more-524). I won’t repeat all the details here, but my task was to continue this project: creating the mylar album sleeves to house the manuscript leaves, construct five new albums that would hold the leaves, and reorganize the collection as requested by Professor Rouse.

Collections Survey:
A collaborative effort with Kristen St. John and Will Lin, the survey’s initiative was to assess the quality and durability of the treatments to circulating library materials that have left the lab. Separate blog posts can be found with the specific details of this project. Through involvement in this survey, I learned about the various types of surveys that can be used to acquire data, choosing a survey sample, and developing a survey format. From our results we anticipated that the sample selected would identify any necessary revisions in lab practices, external causes of damage, and the book’s history after leaving the lab.

Week at the Huntington Library Conservation Lab:
There is an intern swap tradition between UCLA and the Huntington Library in Pasadena. Through this exchange, I was able to spend a week at the Huntington working with paper conservator Erin Jue. While there, I learned another way of approaching photo documentation and writing treatment reports. My project was to remove the chromogenic prints from Octavia Butler Album; a seemingly simple task that demanded a great deal of patience and care. With a heated casseli spatula, I lifted the prints from the deteriorating album leaves and temporarily rehoused them in mylar sleeves. In addition to learning about photograph treatment, the history of the development of photographic processes, and the identifiable characteristics that distinguish each, the true value of this week was in the lab itself and the conversations held while visiting. Each lab is distinct in its facilities, setup, workflow, and practices. For these reasons, each lab offers it own unique perspective to aspiring conservators. Through conversation, I learned the diverse backgrounds and interests that draw people to the field and was given a number of helpful resources and insights for the future. This was an invaluable experience, for which I am most grateful.

At some point, I was informed that the conservation unit is only “a marginal field at the edge of the (library) galaxy,” and though this may be true, I find it to be the most fascinating and intriguing.

My main focus during the internship was on the audiovisual materials in the Synanon Foundation Records collection. The Synanon Foundation, which had its headquarters in Santa Monica, began as a group for detoxification therapy and attracted members to its chapters both nationally and internationally. In 1979, Synanon’s founder, Charles Dederich, Sr. was forced to leave the group after pleading no contest to conspiracy to commit murder. After that, the Foundation quickly dissolved. The materials I worked with included film, video and audio records of Synanon events and recruitment materials. The UCLA Library recently received a National Film Preservation Foundation grant to preserve the 1973 short film “Instant Guide to Synanon”.

I helped to create an inventory of the materials so we now have a record of all the audiovisual titles and formats in the collection, as well as many of their characteristics. Some of my favorite finds included a film titled “The Adventures of Filthy McNasty” and others that were simply labeled “not very interesting.” I liked working with these materials because I encountered many formats I hadn’t seen or worked with before, such as 8mm film cartridges which allowed for easy replay of the material and tiny reels of 1/4” audiotape that could be sent via snail mail. I also finally mastered the ability to differentiate between polyester and acetate-based film. In case you’re interested: if you hold the reel up to the light and look through the side, polyester film is opaque and acetate is translucent.

I also had the chance to work with analog material reformatted to digital files when I learned how to perform quality assurance (QA). My favorite part of this was getting to listen to the audio. One collection I worked on was interviews done by journalist Roy Newquist with famous actors, directors and writers. The best thing I found was a highly enlightening interview with a young Michael Caine from some time in the 1960s: we have included a choice clip of Mr. Caine from this interview comparing male and female brain sizes. I also enjoyed hearing the voices and insights of Katharine Hepburn, Jack Lemmon and James Stewart.

As you can see, there is a lot of great stuff coming out of the UCLA Library’s new AV Preservation program and I feel very lucky to have been able to work with some of it. I’d highly recommend looking into an internship there!

Click to hear:

MichaelCaineQuote

Click to hear:
FrankZappaMusicLibraries

<<Siobhan Hagan, Audiovisual Preservation Specialist

S.R. Ranganathan was a president of the Madras Library Association, but I don’t know if he was at the time this logo was designed or when the book was published. He also had a brilliant mind – one of the greatest in the library field ever.

It had been a very long time since I had thought about Ranganathan. I was introduced to his work as a library school student at the University of Texas at Austin during my Intro to Libraries class. But as I flipped through the book, I read again the Five Laws he published first in 1931. To my mind they are still completely relevant to everything we do here in the library and in preservation and conservation (regardless of the medium being used). Here they are:

1. Books are for use
2. Every Reader His Book
3. Every Book its Reader
4. Save the Time of the Reader
5. the Library is a Growing Organism

Elegant and true.

Kristen