Professional Development

I was able to complete two re-backs from start to finish this week. The two leather spines had dried over night. On the final morning, I still needed to paste down the inside joints or hinge of the books. I had lifted the paper a day earlier. so I tore strips of Japanese paper which I glued underneath the paste down on the covers. I overlapped this paper onto the text block. When both joints were set, we cut a piece of card with a notch in it and used this to hold the boards open while the joints dried.

When both joints were repaired with Japanese paper(Okawara), a piece of card held the boards open to dry.

A finishing touch was to tool the spine. A heated metal tool is rocked across the spine to incise a “blind stamped” line which makes the spine lok more finished.

My books are now done! It feels really good to have slogged through all these steps and have a good final result that will last for years to come.

We’re almost home-honest! This stuff takes time folks- I mean it is important, one of a kind, historical material and must be treated like your pet bunny rabbit when you were 6. The first order of business today was to sew the headbands. To do this, two colors of silk thread are sewn around a core of twine. This stabilizes the the text block to which it is sewn, and forms a very attractive counterpoint to the text.

When the sewing is completed, the ends of the cord are trimmed and the headband is glued down. A piece of Japanese paper covers the sewing.

I cut pieces of leather to match the tone and the size of each book it will be used to repair. Using leather dye and cotton balls, the leather is dyed to match the existing color of the book boards and allowed to dry.

Using a very sharp “skiving knife”-the edges of the pieces of leather are pared down very thin. This is hard, very hard-no amount of holding you mouth in a certain way will help. Practice, practice, practice!

The leather spine piece is then put on the book and reinforced by string, which reinforces the raised bands.

After a half hour, the ends are turned in and the book is left to dry under a weight.

This morning, we used a small tool to fray the ends of the cords we glued to the spines of our books yesterday. The tool is a small wooden peg with 3 sewing needles attached which separates the strands of the cords. These frayed ends will be glued to the boards of the book later.

Then, we mixed paste to use for the days work.

The ends of the frayed cords were then glued down onto both book boards. I slid a piece of release paper on top of it and pressed the books for about 20 minutes.

I used my lifting knife to lift the leather off the cover boards of the book.

All the books were then placed in a press. The spaces between the cords were lined with two layers of Japanese paper and allowed to dry.

A leather lining was made and pasted to the spine. This leather piece was pressed onto the spine and the space around the raised bands on the spine reinforced with string tied to the press.

Tomorrow-rebacking the spine with new leather.

I’ve lifted the spine of my leather books and cleaned off all the residue. Next, the spine is glued out and either cords or tapes are glued onto the spine as sewing structures. This allows you to re-sew the parts of the book that are weak or broken-and let’s face it, after 300 years, you’d be a little worn too!

Sewing is done inside the signature sof the book, and when you reach each cord or tape, you exit the interior of the book and sew out and around the tape or cord.

Next, paper tears and loose signatures are also re-attached to the text block. Tomorrow, we’ll fray the ends of the cords and attach them to the boards with glue. This will make a very strong bond which will hold the boards onto the book. All of the books I brought to the workshop had loose boards-which means, the were not attached to the book at all. When I’m done, they’ll not only be well bonded to the book, they’ll look good too. Stay tuned!

Wilkes-Barre(bear), PA…not your idea of a fun spot, eh?Mine either.This is a place that did have a thriving economy, but that was when coal was king.It’s located on the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania, and now it is definitely a city struggling to make it.I drove 8 hours up I-81 to spend aweek learning leather book conservation from Don Rash, a seasonedbookbinder, calligrapher and letterpress printer who studied with Fritz and Trudi Eberhardt, two well respected binders.Don owns 3 houses, all adjacent to each other: one is Don’s home, one is his workshop and the third is used for student housing.I have the luxury of coming to Don’s school- The School of Formal Bookbinding-on a slow week-so it’s just me and one other student.

We began the first day by discussing each book we’d brought and how we would approach the repair.I brought nine books from Special Collections dating from the 17^th-19^th centuries.Immediately. I realized I needed a tool which I didn’t have-a lifting knife.Don had a new one which he sold me.The lifting knife is used to “lift” the old leather spine from the book.Before we tackled lifting spines, we learned to sharpen our leather skiving knife and my new lifting knife on wet Japanese stones while Bill’s numerous cats watched.

First all the books were ganged together in a large “lying press” with wooden boards separating them.We then took each book and lifted the spines of each one-trying to keep the fragile leather in-tact if possible- if not possible, we tried to save the labels.This required running the lifting knife along the outer edges of the spine and gently encouraging it to release itself.Unless you were really lucky, you just ended up with leather crumbs.When most of the leather was removed, we applied a poultice (glop) of corn starch paste and let it sit for 15 minutes.Then, we used a bone folder to get the remaining leather bits off the spine.Finally, we let the spines dry then removed them from the lying press. Tomorrow…paper repairs, sewing and headbands.

I’m back from this year’s annual conference of the Music Library Association, held in Chicago (during a snowstorm) Feb. 17-21. This year I also attended the pre-conference hosted by MOUG (Music OCLC Users Group). Some highlights:

Sound Recordings and Copyright

Tim Brooks of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections described the ARSC’s work lobbying Congress to reform US copyright law on pre-1972 sound recordings. These recordings are not covered by federal law, but are often governed by state law, which tends to give copyright holders, in Tim’s words, “absolute control.” Tim cited some startling statistics: of all recordings made in the 1940s-70s, only 30% have been made available by the copyright holders; of recordings made in the 1920s-30s, only 10% are available; and of the enormous corpus of ethnic and traditional music from all over the world that was recorded by Columbia and Victor in the early years of the 20th century, only 1% is available. Because US copyright law for sound recordings is the most restrictive in the world, early recordings of American artists are currently legally available in other countries but not in the US — which means that American libraries and archives are unable to preserve this portion of our own heritage.

In response, the ARSC has made the following reccomendations:

• Place pre-1972 recordings under a single federal law.
• Harmonize US copyright law with that of other countries.
• Legalize use of “orphaned” works (whose copyright holders cannot be identified).
• Permit use of “abandoned” works, with compensation to the copyright holders.
• Permit “best practices” digitization for preservation. Libraries and archives are the most likely to preserve early recordings (they have a better track record on this than the recording companies themselves) and the least likely to re-issue recordings (so they’re no financial threat to copyright holders).

Of ARSC’s experiences lobbying Congress members, Tim reports that many were simply unaware of the situation, but were sympathetic when informed; that libraries are seen as non-partisan and a public good, “the guys in the white hats”; and that there is now much “soft” support in Congress. Other ARSC activities include a “white paper” for the Obama administration, and the establishment of an organization called the Historical Recording Coalition for Access and Preservation (HRCAP) to further lobbying efforts.

In another copyright session, attendees and speakers offered some good tips for approaching your legal counsel re digitization projects:

• Present your own credentials (copyright workshops you’ve attended, etc.) pertaining to libraries and copyright.
• Cite specific passages of the law (section 108, 110, etc.)
• Show you’ve done due diligence (e.g., you’ve replaced LPs with CD re-issues where available; you’ve determined other LPs are in deteriorating condition, etc.)
• Try to persuade counsel to adopt a “risk assessment” approach (i.e., just how likely is it that a copyright holder will challenge you in this case) versus the more typical “most conservative” approach.
• File a “contemporaneous writing” — a memo or other document, written at the outset of a digitization project, in which you explain why you believe that you are acting in good faith. This will go a long way towards protecting you if you are in fact challenged by a copyright holder.

Is the Compact Disc Dead?

This was the question addressed by a very interesting panel of speakers, including a VP of Digital Product Strategy at Universal Music Group; the CEO of the Cedille recording label; a concert violinst (Rachel Barton Pine); a former president of the American Symphony Orchestra League; and a music librarian at Northwestern U.

The panel quickly cited a number of reasons to believe that the CD remains a viable format: among these, the universal human desire to own a physical artifact “to give and to show”; the ability to listen on room speakers, not just earbuds; violinst Pine noted that she sells and autographs some 40-70 of her CDs after each performance, that people enjoy the personal contact with the artist, and relish being able to take home a souvenir of the concert. Flaws of downloadable releases were cited in comparison: garbled indexing, making identifying and retrieving of classical works difficult; frequent lack of program notes to provide historical context; the inferior audio quality of compressed files. Changes in student behavior were also noted: in online databases, students tend to retrieve only selected works, or excerpts of works; there doesn’t seem to be the inherent incentive to browse like that offered by physical albums, with the result that students don’t develop as much in-depth knowledge of a composer’s works. On the other hand, the reduced cost of digital distribution has enabled smaller orchestras and other groups to reach a larger audience.

Concern was expressed over an increasing trend among major labels to release performances only in the form of downloadable files, often with a license restricted to “end user only” — preventing libraries from purchasing and making available these performances to their users. The panel proposed that performers and IAML (the International Association of Music Libraries) put pressure on the record companies. Alternative approaches? CDs-on-demand: Cedille’s boss sees this as a growing trend. Also, consortial deals with individual record companies: OhioLink has recently done one with Naxos.

Finally, a concern was expressed about the aggregator model of audio-steaming databases: that these hamper libraries’ responsiveness to local user needs, and the building of the unique collections important for research. The music library community needs to negotiate for distribution models that enable individual selection for traditional collection development.

How Music Libraries are Using New Technologies

• Videos demonstrating specific resources, such as composers’ thematic catalogs (similar to Lauren’s Research Toolkits).
• “Un-associations,” in informal online forums like Yahoo or Google groups. There are currently groups for orchestra libraries, flutists, etc.
• Use of Delicious to create user guides.
• Meebo for virtual ref.
• Twitter for virtual ref and for announcements/updates.
• Widgets and gadgets to embed customized searches, other libraries’ searchboxes, and other web content into LibGuides, etc.
• ChaCha (a cellphone question-answering service) for virtual ref. Indiana U is partnering with ChaCha in a beta test.

JSTOR

A JSTOR rep presented palns to add 20 more music journals to the database, including more area-studies and foreign-language titles. Attendees pointed out that popular music serials (Downbeat, Rolling Stone, etc.) are becoming primary source material for scholarly research — would JSTOR consider including them? The rep replied that JSTOR originally required that journals be peer-reviewed, but had recently begun to relax this rule. A dabate ensued among attendees as to whether the pop publications were sufficiently relevant to JSTOR’s mission — some believed that JSTOR should stick to its original focus on scholarly literature, and that others could preserve the pop stuff.

Bibliographic Control and the LC Working Group (or: Music Catalogers Freak Out)

The MOUG plenary session gave catalogers a forum to discuss ramifications of the LC Working Group’s recommendations on bibliographic control (see my blog posting for RTSS 08). Concerns expressed:

If collaboration is properly defined as “doing something together for a purpose,” then the disparate (and sometimes opposing) purposes of publishers, vendors, and libraries means that LC’s vision of collective responsibility for metadata and bibliographic control will not constitute true collaboration, but merely exploitation.

The Working Group appears to some to harbor a naive faith in digital architecture to meet all discovery and retrieval needs (it reminded one attendee of predictions that microform would solve all our problems). This is perceived to cultivate a gobal, generalist, one-size-fits-all outlook divorced from existing patterns of scholarly communication and “communities of practice” (e.g., the subject specialist and the community of practitioners that he/she serves). Bibliographic control should be “a network of communication between communities of practice.” An MLA liaison to ALA’s RDA committee noted that the RDA folks expected local catalogers to help fill in the gaps in the currently-vague RDA code — but when specialist communities actually propose details (such as a list of genre terms for music), they’re “dissed.”

Others fear that if LC backs away from its historical role as national library, relying on the larger community of publishers, vendors, and libraries to collaborate in bibliographic control, the actual effect will be that library administrators will think: “If LC isn’t doing this work, then we don’t have to either” — and collaboration will disappear.

Yet others fear the “commodification of cataloging.” With the increasing availability of MARC records and other metadata from third-party sources, there seems to be a growing perception that all metadata is the same — and a concommitant decline in willingness to investigate its source and quality. Administrators increasingly speak of metadata as a commodity.

Remember Katrina?

I’ll close with an item from the business meeting of SEMLA (the Southeast chapter) which was a cause of great celebration: our colleagues from Tulane University in New Orleans, whose music collection was flooded in Hurricane Katrina, announced that 70% of their collection has successfully been restored, and the last portion of it recently returned to them. They brought along a few representative items for show and tell — including a score died pink by its red paper covers. Recalling photos of the original damage, a 70% recovery rate seems a miracle!

On Friday, March 13th, ZSR hosted a Disaster Recovery workshop sponsored by the NC Preservation Consortium. Thirteen participants from North Carolina attended representing High Point University, UNCG and Elon University, Rural Hall County Clerk, Wilkes Heritage Museum, Rural Hall Historical Museum, NC Museum of Art, Old Salem and the EPA. The workshop began with Sharon Snow welcoming the group and speaking on collections care and prioritization. Robert James, NCPC Executive Director, then covered all the primary areas of disaster recovery: planning, preparation, response, organization and the Disaster Plan.

Craig Fansler spoke next on stockpiling disaster supplies, preparedness, planning, and the importance of keeping your disaster Plan current and flexible. Numerous anecdotes from ZSR disasters were also shared with the group. I used the Field Guide to Emergency Response produced by Heritage Preservation (2006) as a guide for my discussion.

Michelle Brock, from Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Emergency Management spoke on disaster Recovery for Heritage Collections. The priority in a disaster is to preserve-people first, then property. The four phases of emergency response are: planning, response, mitigation, and recovery. All disasters are local- Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Office of Emergency Management is our primary agency. Other important agencies are: FEMA and the NCEM-NC Division of Emergency Management.

Michelle discussed fire safety; gas leaks/chemical spills; natural hazards: hurricanes. tornados, ice storms, severe weather and flooding, etc. She advised getting a NOAA Weather radio which will wake you up in the middle of the night (or day) if severe weather is approaching. September is National Preparedness Month and activities are held to promote awareness from local public safety agencies: fire, law enforcement, DOT, CERT (Citizen Emergency Response Team), and the hospitals. Ready.gov- is a government site for information making an emergency plan for businesses and individuals so they are prepared for emergencies.

Make sure your Insurance coverage is adequate; and you have prepared for loss of utilities, security, a back up site and media relations. Local Emergency Planning Committees (LEPCs) work to understand chemical hazards in the community, develop emergency plans in case of an accidental release, and look for ways to prevent chemical accidents. NIMS-National Incident Management System- provides coordination during emergencies. IPER- is the Intergovernmental Preparedness for Essential Records and is run by the Council of State Archivists. IPER is trying to develop and deliver Web- and CD-based training for state and local governments nationwide.

Robert discussed the Heritage Preservation Disaster Wheel and it’s uses. This device helps you go through the steps of disaster response as well as listing how to preserve each kind of material. The final part of the day was dividing into groups who were provided with a disaster scenario and asking the group to make decisions about priorities and solutions.

Preserving Oral Histories

Tim Mitchell and I attended a webinar presented by Solinet on January 15, 2009 entitled: Preserving Oral Histories. This workshop was a discussion about the primary issues of preserving oral histories.

The activity of processing oral histories was covered first.The most important issue when processing is to prevent audio from being erased (either audio cassettes or CD’s).The processor should conduct a condition assessment to check for damage and if possible, play and listen to the material.A strong odor detected at this point would indicate deterioration.The items should then be labeled, re-housed; and new reformatted preservation copies made.

There are several free tools available for surveying oral history collections:

FACET (Field Audio Collection evaluation Tool) is a survey tool which is an open-sourced database that allows for recordinginformation about materials.

Preservation Tool for Audio and Moving Image Collections- Columbia University Libraries has developed and tested a tool to inventory and assess the physical condition of audio and moving image materials.

Damage to audio materials

Magnetic tape damage is usually referred to as “Sticky shed syndrome” and is the deterioration of audio material.

Acetate tape deterioration is the formation of acetic acid on the tape which is called “Vinegar Syndrome” because of the smell it gives.This material should be isolated in cold storage.The Image Permanence Institute has A-D strips to test for acetate decay.

Labeling Oral Histories- Guidelines for future users should be created that uses a consistency of format.Water-based markers (sold in specialty shops) or pencils should be used for marking on the material itself.CD’s should be marked on the inner hub.

Preserving Originals

-use highest quality format available

-make a copy of the original and use that copy for reformatting-put the original away in storage

-only use the master for making usable copies

-keep original hardware and software if possible

Housing

-use best quality materials

-arrange by material type or by format

-store the master separately

Paper/Board-use material that conforms with NISO Z39 standards

Plastics-use inert plastics-avoid PVC (polyester is a good inert plastic)

Temperature-the best temperature for audio materials is 50 degrees, 30-50 Relative Humidity

Avoid electromagnetic fields or UV radiation

Storage-film

-shelve vertically, except 16mm/35m which should be stored horizontally

-keep in a dust free environment

Storage-Magnetic media

-for optical media (CD-R), avoid light

Storage-Transcriptions

-use acid free paper

-for electronic transcriptions, store in multiple formats

Storage-Online

-RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)- a technology that employs the simultaneous use of two or more hard disk drives to achieve greater levels of performance and reliability.

-LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)- based at Stanford University Libraries, is an international community initiative that provides libraries with digital preservation tools and support so that they can easily and inexpensively collect and preserve their own copies of authorized e-content.

-Dark Archives- a collection of materials preserved for future use but with no current access.This is associated with collections of online serial publications and databases that are held by an organization other than the publisher.

Preferred Digital Formats

Audio

.wav- considered the standard for audio archives

.bmv-broad cast wave- an open format with the inclusion of metadata

.mp3-a small file size, compressed file format that

Video

.MJ2 (Motion Jpeg 2000)- used by the Library of Congress as the standard format

.MXF- open source format that allows metadata inclusion

.AVI-Audio Video Interleave used primarily for video on the web

Audio Digitization Standards-the recommended rate for voice recordings:

Human Voice-sample rate- 96 kHz; bit depth- 24 bit

This workshop was thorough and illustrated that preservation issues for audio oral histories are unique and the housing materials, methods, and survey tools for them are specific to this audio material.

Craig Fansler

an example of an old scrapbook

On Wednesday, July 16, Vicki Johnson and I attended a Solinet workshop on the care of scrapbooks. The workshop was presented by Jessica Leming of Solinet Preservation Services. This workshop covered a seldom addressed topic-the deterioration of older scrapbook collections. These scrapbooks take a variety of shapes and forms- ledgers, re-purposed sales catalogs, and bound materials of all kinds. At one time, it was apparently popular to take any bound item and paste your mementos inside as if all the pages were blank.

Jessica covered the general areas of assessment (condition), prevention treatments, housing(what to put a scrapbook in to protect it) and policies.

One of the main issues with preservation of historic scrapbooks is the use of “ground wood pulp paper”-a paper made from unbuffered wood pulp that is very acidic. This kind of paper was used heavily form around 1850-1900 to meet growing demands. Now, this paper is becoming brittle and causing problems. Other issues seen in historic scrapbooks is fading of photographs, staining from glues, binding failure de-lamination, brittle/yellowed cellophane tape, and faded inks.

Solutions for scrapbook preservation include:

* Interleaving of acid-free cotton rag paper-the step insulates each page from the other and can prevent staining and bleed through.
* Enclosures- drop spine or archival boxes can house an entire scrapbook to prevent further deterioration and light damage.

* Treatment

1. stabilization can be attained by mending or storage
2. Reformatting- making a preservation facsimile or a preservation microfilm copy will protect the original item while allowing access to the content.
3. Digitization- another way to allow access to the information of an item while protecting the actual item from handling damage.
4. Disbinding/Preservation- the scrapbook can actually be restored if the money and preservation skills are present

This workshop helped me to be aware of a growing area of preservation needs and the appropriate methods of protecting historic scrapbooks.