 This is Susan Barger. I'm the Connecting to Collections Care Coordinator and I want to welcome you to this webinar on care of books and scrapbooks. I'm going to go through my little shtick quickly and then we'll get on to Rebecca Elder. If you need questions, if you need answers to questions about caring for collections, you can always post them in the discussion forum on our website. The one thing you have to do there is you need to register which doesn't cost you anything and it's mainly to protect people's privacy. So feel free to use that. There are always people there looking to make sure questions get answered in a timely way. And we have a Facebook page. We also have Twitter. And we also have the Connecting to Collections Care Announcements which is a list surf that's only for announcements. We only do a few announcements a month. So join that and we won't inundate you. You can always contact me. This is my email address. If you have any suggestions or complaints or anything, please let us know. And coming up in August, we're going to have a really interesting webinar on emergency planning when you have animals. And also it's about contingency planning. So if you have an emergency and you think something's going to happen, but do you have a plan in case something else happens? So by all means do that, take advantage of that. And then in September, we're going to have webinars on cap and map and one on steps. So we'll look forward to seeing you guys will be posted soon. And now I'm going to turn it over to Rebecca Elder who is our presenter for today and I'll let Rebecca introduce herself. So Rebecca, take it away. Hi there. Let me see if I can get to the next slide. I'm having trouble getting to the first slide in my presentation. There it is. Thank you. So welcome everybody. I am delighted to see that right now we have over 150 people who want to talk about scrapbooks and books. They're some of my favorite things. Let me introduce myself first. My name is Rebecca Elder and I am a preservation specialist based in Austin, Texas. I am trained as a rare books and paper conservator. However, these days I don't do much bench work. Instead I spend my time working with libraries, museums, archives, municipalities, anybody who has collections, helping them figure out the best ways to take care of their collections. So I do a lot of preservation assessments, a lot of training, a lot of emergency preparedness work. I know just enough about enough things to get myself in trouble. So we are going to spend the next hour or so talking about books and scrapbooks. And yes, since Susan is posting, if you have questions as we go through, go ahead and put them in the questions and comments box that everyone seems to have found. And then we'll make sure at the end we have put in ample time for answering questions. So get all your questions in there because I want to make sure you know everything. Also, my contact information is right there on the slide so make sure you take that down. And let's go ahead and get started. So my plan for today is to talk about books, book structure, a little book history, and then how to take care of books. After that we'll talk about scrapbooks and some care and handling. And I'll leave you with some resources. So books, books are great. They're kind of a classic structure and they're fairly easy to understand, which is one of my favorite things about them. So the codex is the first thing that we really understand as a book, the way we think of a book, pages down between covers. And it was created in the early second century AD and used until the 11th century and they were actually created in Ethiopia. And what you are seeing on the screen, the illustration there, is what an ecoptic or Ethiopian binding looks like. So you can see that it's something you would recognize as a book. The next gigantic development was the Gutenberg Bible, which was printed in 1455. And that brought the print era right in and book publishing exploded. The next major thing that we see happening is in the 1820s. We're beginning to get to the rise of literacy and the need for cheaper and cheaper books. So publishers started figuring out ways to make books more cheaply and the earliest publishers' cloth bindings, which are books that are bound by the publisher and not sent to the bookbinder for binding for your personal library, were 1821. And by 1830, when we really needed cheap books, we had the first paperbacks. So that's just a really, really brief sketch of the history of the book. As far as technologies, papermaking was invented in 105 AD in China. And it slowly made its way around to Europe by the 11th century until then writing would have been done on parchment and vellum. And the handpapermaking era lasted until the early 1800s. The first papermaking machine was patented by a man named Fadrenier. You don't need to know how to spell it. And what you need to know with that is that there isn't a whole lot of difference in paper if you make it by hand or make it by machine if you use the same ingredients. How it moves is slightly different, but nothing to really worry about. Where we end up beginning to introduce problems are in 1807, when Alamrazin's size is introduced. Alamrazin is another way of saying aluminum sulfate. It's a common name for aluminum sulfate. And size is something that is put on the paper to prevent feathering in ink. So if your paper wasn't size and you were using a quill pen and ink from an inkwell, it would be like writing on a Kleenex with a magic marker. So not very, very useful. So in the handpapermaking era, size was just you dip the paper in a vat of gelatin, let it dry, you have your size. However, we're mechanizing things. We get Alamrazin size, which is a chemical you stir into the paper pulp. The unfortunate downside of this is that when the Alamrazin deteriorates, it releases acids that catalyze deterioration in the paper and makes your paper die much more quickly. And then wood pulp paper was introduced in 1843. This matters because paper that's made primarily with wood has a substance in it called lignin. Lignin is what keeps the trees straight up and down. If you didn't have lignin, your trees would not have the structure they need to stand up. So that's great. When you put lignin into paper, it deteriorates quite quickly. What you're familiar with probably is if you have a newspaper that's been on the front porch for a couple of days and it turns yellow, that's lignin doing what lignin does. So around the 1840s, you start seeing the beginning of brittle paper because of the wood pulp paper and the combination of that with the Alamrazin size that produces acids that catalyze deterioration. And we could easily talk about that for hours, but we're not going to. We are going to move on and just do a little terminology with parts of the book. My little arrow tool. So over here, number one, this is a publisher's diagram. One is called a belly band, which is something that publishers and printers put around the outside of the book. It's usually an advertising piece. Two is the dust jacket. The value of most collector books lies in the dust jacket. So if you have one, it's important to keep it in good condition. Depending on your context, you might wrap it in mylar, you might box the book. The three over here, that's referring to the end sheet, which is that when you first open the book, that's what you see. And the part that's attached to the cover is called the paste down and the adjacent sheet is the fly leaf. Over here, four, the back of the book is the spine. That's probably not surprising to anyone. The top of the book over here at five is usually referred to as the head. And over here is the fore edge, which is F-O-R-E-E-D-G-E. The bottom of the book is referred to as the tail. And then eight over here, the right-hand side of the page is the recto. The left-hand side is the verso. And technically the verso, really the verso is the reverse of the recto. And finally, ten there in the middle is the gutter. That's probably the most vocabulary you really need unless you're going to be going deeply, deeply into rare books. But it is useful to have at least some of the technical terms down. So now that we've gotten through all of the technical stuff, let's talk about what you're probably really here for, which is how to take care of books and scrapbooks. Or at least books for right now. It's useful to know some of the common forms of damage because that will inform how we think about handling and caring for the books. So the common things, your text block separates from the case. Something happens to separate your end sheets and your pages are in one hand, your covers in the other. It could be poor adhesive manufacture, it could be rough handling. One of the super common things is damage to the top of the spine. That happens almost invariably when people use the end cap of the book, the top of the spine of the book as a book removal tab, when they're taking it off the shelf. Book cloth gets brittle over time and putting that stress on it will cause it to tear. Yes, Berlin, it's the worst. Detached covers. So one of the covers gets torn off. I like, I think of that a lot in terms of leather bound books. That hinge just gets worn down over time, it detaches. Torn pages obviously from tearing and torn end sheets from turning pages roughly. So some tips on shelving. One of the biggest things I can tell you on shelving is to make sure that your books are straight up and down on the shelves. If you have things that are leaning, if they lean long enough over time they'll warp and that warp will be very difficult to undo, if at all. So what you see in this picture, I chose it because all of those books look how nice and straight they are. The problem with this is that this library wasn't using any bookends. And you really don't want to cram books into the shelves. You want to make sure there's enough room for the bookends because that will give you some extra room when you're shelving and unshelving. You can use the bookends to move them around. They keep shelves tidy and they do keep your books from leaning. I love to see books that are shelved by size. So if I had my own library I would try to have three sections. One for small books, say maybe six inches and smaller. One for normal sized books. And then one for oversized books which could be anywhere 12 to 14 inches and taller than that. Because if you shelve books by size you're going to keep pressure all the way up the sides of each book. If I have a little six inch book and our call numbers say that it should be shelved next to the gigantic Atlas that Atlas isn't going to have its cover held in place well. It will droop over the book in time. It'll be a gravity thing. If your book is too big to put on the shelf it's great if you can put it spine down or with oversized materials. So oversized materials that's obvious. But if you shelve your book spine down it will keep your textbook book adhered into the case. If you shelve a book spine up so with the fore edge down on the shelf over time gravity will cause your text block to fall out of the case. And then you'll be coming to me and saying where is your video on how to tighten hinges and get that fixed. When you take books off the shelf you want to push them back. Push the books on either side back and then pull the book off by its spine. And that avoids that end cap damage we talked about on the last slide. And finally in my dream world you would avoid wooden shelving because wood off gases chemicals that will catalyze deterioration in your books. If you can't avoid your wooden shelving like this is clearly in a reading room. I bet if that librarian went in and said we have to get rid of our wood the powers that be would kind of flip out because it's pretty. So you can line the shelves with mylar to provide a barrier or some kind of an alcohol and buffered board or paper to absorb some of those assets. Oversized books. Oversized books should be shelved horizontally and ideally no more than three high. So this library has some shelves that are about six to eight inches tall set up and there's a whole lot of them. They're probably ten tall. What we want to see happen is that you would shelve the largest book on the bottom. And that way everything is getting support across the surface of the entire book. So if you look at this blue book over here it's kind of one of the ugliest things in this picture because you see how much bigger it is than the books underneath it. That means that over time gravity is going to pull that cover out of alignment and cause some pretty serious warping. When you're taking oversized materials off the shelves it's really tempting to do the magician with the tablecloth to yank the bottom of the bottom book out from underneath all the books on top. That can end up with many books falling onto the floor. So ideally you want to take each book off of your stack to get to the book at the bottom and then stack them all back up. Which means that you want to have room in your stacks or a book truck with you so you have somewhere to put all of the books you're taking off the shelf. And finally when you're transporting books particularly when you're transporting oversized books it's much safer to put them on book trucks. If you're trying to transport multiple oversized books in your arms that is an excellent, excellent, excellent way to drop your books on the ground. I wanted to talk a little bit about storage enclosures, fragile books, deteriorated books, and things that are otherwise vulnerable should be boxed. So there's lots of different kinds of boxes out there. This box up top is a custom made cloth covered clamshell box and that's kind of the Cadillac solution to the problem. They are super beautiful and they also create an impression when you present a book to a patron in a box like that. That says this is a really important thing. They're also expensive so they may not be your first go to except for your very, very most special things. There are lots of different types of boxes that you can make and I believe I put some links on the resource list. You can also do a solution like this and I think most archival supply purveyors have a system like this where you buy just strips of board that are pre-scored and you fold them at the right places. You wrap the book in one, wrap it in the other direction with another and fasten it all up with Velcro dots. That's something that you don't need to have a whole lot of technical expertise or equipment to do and it works well as well. Then when you use books, one of the biggest things we think about when we're using books is how the book opens. Particularly for older books because if we open the book farther than it wants to open, we'll break the spine. So this book in the photograph, oh that opens nice and flat but as we're getting into rare and special materials that's really not the case with a lot of books. And if we open them so that they do lay flat like that, we will do some terrible damage to them. So in your reading room, you should have book supports available. Book cradles can be made in many, many, many ways. These are foam wedges of varying thicknesses and angles and you can buy them. There's also directions out there on the internet for making something called a velvet mailbox which is a cloth covered. It looks like a mailbox. Then you make them in pairs and use them to angle the book the way you want. But foam wedges are common, you don't have to be crafty to make them and they let you adjust the angles of your cradles infinitely to meet the needs of your books. And then you use weighted snakes which are these guys. They are tubes of cotton fabric with weights inside of them that you lay across the pages. And that keeps things open to the right page in a very gentle, organic manner. So this is useful for display, it's also useful for the reading room. And I just wanted to put in a reminder that likely your patrons aren't going to know how to use this equipment. So your staff is going to need to teach them how to use it safely. You also want to teach people to turn pages carefully especially when paper is brittle or weak or very large because all of those are easy to damage. All the brittle paper caused from the wood pulp paper and the alum rosin size. Most of that brittle paper is in books and careless turning will do damage. And then a few tips on using books. First, always when you're using books use clean hands. I don't use gloves when I'm handling paper. The primary reason you would use gloves for books would be to prevent fingerprints but books aren't going to get fingerprints on them. Paper just doesn't usually take fingerprints like that. They won't be visible. But you lose an awful lot of manual dexterity when you put those gloves on. So you're more likely to do damage. And if you are using cotton gloves the paper is likely to snag on that cotton fabric. And on brittle paper that can do damage. If you have gloves for books and paper you can just handle with clean hands. When you are using books leave them on the support while they're reading them. Don't hold them off the table. It's not like you are reading your paper back in the bathtub. One of my big bugaboos are pressure sensitive adhesives on special collections materials. I am. So anytime you use tape it's most likely to cause more problems than it solves somewhere on down the road. And post-it notes. If you are using post-it notes on, well when you use post-it notes even though they peel off you're leaving behind some adhesive. And also if you are using post-it notes on brittle paper when you peel that back you can take a chunk of the page off the bond between the post-it note and the paper will be stronger than the bond between the paper molecules and you'll just take a chunk of paper right off of the post-it. So use acid-free flags instead of post-it notes for marking rare and special books. Obviously dog-earing books does damage to them. Acidic bookmarks. Maybe not problematic in the extreme short term like five minutes. But what happens is invariably somebody forgets to take that acidic bookmark out. Your book goes back on the shelf. You repage it again five years later and there is a big old yellow mark where the bookmark is sat because the acids in the bookmark are migrating out into the less acidic paper of the book and you're getting some very serious localized deterioration there. I think we have talked about transporting books on trucks. And then leather dressings also tend to create more problems than they solve. They tend to over time actually dry things out and if you use them improperly and put too much on them and then put your books back on the shelf under the pressure of the book ends, the leather dressings will actually cause your books to stick together. So leather dressings definitely something to stay away from. Just a reminder that rare books should not be photocopied because photocopiers are notorious for breaking spines, even a nice book edge scanner. So it's better to photograph or use a scanner that's designed to scan books that has a cradle and you turn pages individually. Tracy had a book where someone used bacon. Oh dear, bless their hearts. Okay, the last thing I wanted to talk about before we move on to scrap books and albums is exhibiting rare books because books can be a fantastic thing to put on exhibit. They're often beautiful objects, they contain really interesting information and the contents are beautiful so I love to see them on display. The image that you're seeing is from National Park Service Conservogram 18-1 which is instructions on how to make an inexpensive and easy book cradle. It's made out of three layers of mylar. I have made them, they are easy and they look really sharp because they will just kind of fade into your background. So we want to minimize light damage and that means we want to exhibit rare books at low light levels, less than 50 lux or so. If you don't have a light meter, I would encourage you to buy one and honestly, you can buy a really, really expensive light meter from an archival supplier but a couple of years ago I needed several and I bought some 25 buck ones from Amazon and clocked them against my expensive light meter and they were fine. If you email me, I'll give you the exact reference for the light meter that I bought but you probably don't need a $250 light meter. If you're going to display a book open, use a cradle and if your pages won't stay in place, you can use mylar strapping that you can buy from archival suppliers to hold your pages in place if needed and then turn your pages regularly so that you get even light exposure through the book and things don't, how do I want to say this, you get even light exposure and also the book doesn't get used to being in any one position for too long so turn your pages every couple of weeks and that's kind of a whole bunch of books very quickly so let's go ahead and move on to scrapbooks scrapbooks are one of my favorite things in collections, scrapbooks and albums are also a challenge because they add on multiple layers of complexity to books which are for something that's so simple and everyday are actually remarkably complex pieces of engineering so scrapbooks and albums, sometimes you just have to say oh bless their hearts scrapbooks and albums were popular from the Victorian era around the Victorian era photographers started making standardized sized photographs cards to visit and cabinet cards that were album and prints mounted on a little piece of board Queen Victoria loved collecting them so it became a fad to collect especially the cards to visit and albums were developed to hold them so Queen Victoria was responsible for albums there are lots of types of structures for albums there are ones that are sewn those are problematic because once something is sewn there's not a lot of way to adjust the thickness for putting in objects that force your spine to expand some sewn albums will have stubs put between the pages to help with that but you'll also see albums that were created by somebody taking a book of wallpaper samples and pasting over the wallpaper samples for example you also have albums that are laced so there are holes drilled in the sides of the pages and then some kind of a tie is threaded through them and tied I love those and there are ones that are done with posts which are just metal posts into pieces that screw apart to the right thickness and you'll see all of those out there and probably more and more I think I wanted to talk specifically about our friend the Magnetic Album which is to say our enemy the Magnetic Album those are ubiquitous from the 60's forward all of my childhood photographs were in Magnetic Albums they are the pages that are covered with adhesive and then they have a plastic overlay that you open up smack your pictures onto the adhesive and then drop the plastic back over them they are everywhere they are the worst because they are extremely damaging to the contents the adhesives are acidic the boards they're made from are acidic the plastic is a poor quality plastic and the plastic doesn't breathe so all the acids in the adhesive and board have no real choice except to attack the objects that were trying to safeguard by using them and you find lots of things in albums so the obvious ones are things like photos, news clippings, ribbons, pressed flowers programs and tickets, locks of hair when I was growing up my granddad had an album someone had made for him that had candy stuck to the pages because quote he was so sweet I have heard stories about people's body parts fingers and toes being preserved in albums you just never know what you're going to find I hope you never find a straight toe the thing to remember is that including all of those objects then means that you have to think about how all of those objects deteriorate when you think about caring for your album common forms of damage that we see we see acid migration maybe you'll have a newspaper clipping opposite a theater program and you'll open it up and you'll see on the theater program which was on good quality paper a big yellow mark that corresponds exactly to your newspaper clipping that's because the newspaper clipping is super acidic wood pulp paper and those acids just rush right out into the better quality paper and cause damage there you'll see lots of brittle paper albums were designed to be inexpensive consumer commodities not preservation vehicles so they're made with cheap paper which becomes brittle all adhesives will fail over time it's just how it happens so you'll see things falling out that were put into albums with adhesive for magnetic albums when the adhesive starts to fail it's a blessing for other things maybe not so much sometimes you'll see people putting things into albums with staples or pins over time those can corrode especially if they're not a good quality metal and people will cram albums so full that you can't shut them and when you try to shut them you'll end up doing some damage to the spine so they are super problematic little creatures so what kinds of options do we have when we're dealing with photo albums? first we can rehouse them and we'll talk about that on the next slide but I believe that every album you have in your collection should be in its own box to protect it and keep all the pieces together because invariably they will fall apart at some point if your album's in very poor condition or your scrapbook you might consider reformatting it or if it's heavily used you might consider reformatting it so you could photograph it you could digitize it you could photocopy it and make that be what people use first before you offer them the original artifact maybe you have a bunch of photos in a magnetic album and for some reason you want to retain that album format there's something special about that you can buy a better quality album and recreate the album very carefully matching up placement on the better quality pages and use better quality ways to adhere use good quality photocorners instead of glue stick maybe for putting things on your page and finally you can also, depending on the album if there's no great artistry and it's just four photos smacked together on a page like this one page that you're seeing you can think about removing the objects from the album and either storing them separately or just throwing away the album so this particular pay album yes it's not going to ever come apart because whoever glued those on whoever glued those pictures to that page they were serious this is one of my demo pieces the edges fall apart but those they're not going anywhere, that glue is sturdy but if you have something that you can remove there's no great artistry to it, no notations you might be better off just taking a picture of all the pages and then pulling it apart getting rid of that non-descript black paper and storing the photos in a box in terms of housings for scrapbooks so there's a couple of rules you put them in boxes and you always want to store them flat that's so that if anything falls off you know where it came from it won't be floating around at the bottom of your box if you're seeing acid migration you may want to consider interleaving the pages with Mylar or acid free paper to provide a buffer between your objects and I really like to see people at least interleave at the front and the back page of albums because the adhesive that was used to attach those end sheets is pretty viciously acidic and finally something I do fairly often is take out the posts or the laces if it's an album that's stacked pages I take those apart hang on to the posts or the laces so we know what was originally there but that way when we turn the pages we're not bending them they're just turning flat it doesn't to my mind damage the bookness of it but it does make it safer to handle as far as to disassemble or not to disassemble that's a call that you make on a case by case basis and the three questions that you're going to ask yourself first is the scrapbook damaging to the contents if the scrapbook is damaging to the contents then you might well want to take it apart you also want to think about the value of the scrapbook as an artifact like that page we looked at on a couple of slides ago that were just the four pictures smacked on the page no great artistry there but if somebody spent time assembling it and making it beautiful and there's some artistic intent then yeah that you're going to think twice about disassembling because there is some greater meaning it's the total is more than the sum of the parts and finally you have to think about whether you can safely remove the contents like that black page from a few pages ago I would love to take those photographs off of there but I'm going to do more damage that's quick and catastrophic by trying to lift those pictures up somehow then the incremental damage of being adhered to acidic paper so it really is a case by case by case basis you also are going to be thinking about how much time you have because I'm here to tell you that taking a scrapbook apart is a time consuming process you may just not have that kind of labor resources if you do end up with the disassembly option please remember that you should always create a digital surrogate it's so easy to just take photographs or scan pages so that you have a record of what it looks like before you took it apart you never know what researchers may need that so finally just some general resources and you can download the resource list that has links in it national park service conserve programs you probably already know about them they're some of my favorite resources for all kinds of museum objects but that's where you will find the do-it-yourself Mylar book cradle there's also a handout on deciding what makes a book rare and they're awesome likewise the northeast document conservation center preservation leaflets is very good on books and photographs the library of congress has an excellent page on preservation of scrapbooks and albums the American library associations technical services group ALCTS has another webinar that you can listen to for observing scrapbooks archived on their website Missouri state archives has some really good handouts and I like theirs on scrapbooks and finally if you want to dig deeper the American Institute for Conservation has a wiki that has some good information on scrapbooks and it also links out to resources that are aimed more at conservators than the general public but depending on how deep you dive into this it's a very very very good resource and the last thing I wanted to do before we move over for questions is just let you know that my email address is on your screen and if you come up, because I always come up with my questions four in the morning three days after I learned about something so if that happens don't hesitate to shoot me an email I'll be happy to talk to you about whatever just stay in touch so that's everything that I have prepared so maybe we should move over to questions and answers Okay, do you want me to read the questions? Yeah, why do you? Because I can only see half of them on my screen Okay, so I will read the questions I want to put the evaluation link up here the evaluations are really important so please take time and fill them out and I look at them just so sometimes people think oh you don't look at them so the first question is from Marguerite Callum at Crazy Horse in South Dakota I love Crazy Horse in South Dakota it is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been sorry she says I need help with scrapbook preservation after being digitized so after being digitized you would treat them like you would treat them before digitization if you've taken them apart for digitization box them and store them flat okay and if there was anything that's kind of if there are more specifics you can go ahead and put them in the questions and comments and maybe we can get a better answer than that okay Catherine Collett had a question is it signatures or choirs for modern books this is on terminology I call them sections signatures are so a lot of people use signatures it's actually more technical than that it has to do with early printing where you would print maybe you would print 16 pages on one large page and then fold it up and that became the signature for modern books from a publisher these days, sections okay Molly Hall says does anyone have an issue where someone will donate a book to the library that's thrown away the dust jacket imagine that happens a lot I would say and there's not really much you can do about that because it comes to you like it comes to you yeah I've had a lot of problems with detached pages not covers in the center of a book I am guessing you are probably talking about paperbacks yeah because paperbacks the adhesive that they use to make modern paperbacks is pretty akin to what comes out of your hot melt glue gun which if you use one you probably know is a quick setting but not very sturdy adhesive I believe and I'm going to type it into the chat box so have a look over there there is a group called the Sustainable Heritage Network that if you google you'll be able to find and a couple of years ago for them I did a video on how to tip pages back in that you should be able to find on their website so there is a way to do it I don't know you essentially put a very very thin bead of polyvinyl acetate adhesive it's not a special collections technique that you want to get a conservator involved in but for just normal books you can put a eighth of an inch bead of PDA adhesive and just glue it to the page in front of it and that will work like a charm and I'll add that link to the resources before I post a recording oh thank you the Sustainable Heritage Network that's really amazing work and they have tons of videos on all kinds of preservation topics and Karen DeWitt asked about laying over size books on their flat and so I think you answered that one should bookends be used on rare books that are not yet boxed? yes because it's still going to be safer than shoving too many books into a case into a shelf to keep them standing up straight so yes and I've made plenty of pretty fancy schmancy rare books libraries that you just you can't box everything in your collection you can't afford to once you start boxing everything your collection gets a lot bigger you don't have this space so if something is really fragile absolutely box it if it's not fragile it is fine to just be on a shelf with a bookend okay Molly Hall in Netherland, Texas said we actually laminate the covers because we found that mylar covers were falling off of being torn I assume that means paper back books my question to you Molly is are you doing that on circulating collections or special collections materials for circulating collections do what you want the books going to fall apart or it becomes a problem but for something that's special collections that you're not circulating you don't ever want to laminate it because they're not in the 5 or 10 year range but in the 50 year range that's going to deteriorate and cause problems for you but circulating collections if lamination works for you I have no problem yeah okay book supports on the cheat book futons I've used I've made four or five of them this is Tracy Hampton and she said she'll send us instructions on how to make book futons and I will post those along with the recording I can't wait to see them a little after the recording gets done because Tracy says she needs to put something together but that's great book futons are really nice and I just was at the Newbury Library in Chicago and they have a group of volunteers that makes book futons for them and they can make set aside a day and ten of these little ladies and make book futons and they just put them in the washing machine and wash them when they get dirty so it's a nice solution okay what if the book has significant dirt or dust do you use I use gloves to keep my hands clean this is Hailey Dodie Vadim so if the book has significant dirt or dust I would love first of all I would love to see you set up a book cleaning program periodically so that that doesn't happen but the best way to handle that is you want to keep the book closed and use some pressure so you're not going to force dirt and dust into the book and either use a vacuum or a soft cloth or a soft brush to dust the book off and Michael Nagy asks what about red rot treatments or suggestions so there's not really a way to fix red rot for stabilizing it that's something that's best left to a conservator what I recommend for people to do is to use Mylar to create a dust jacket because Mylar has a static electric field associated with it and it'll keep the red rot contained okay there were several questions about what to use in books next so let's talk about the use of shocks anything else I just talked over you curtain weights really you should be able to go to the hardware store potentially a really good fabric store and buy weights that are strung together really anything that is heavy and flexible you could put into a book weight but honestly I think if you price them you'll probably find that they are inexpensive enough to buy easier to buy them than to fool around with making them yeah and make sure they have a cover you can take off and clean yes okay then Evelyn Fieler had a question about stuff press flowers bookmarks and she says we keep the context as part of the artifact though I will admit to not keeping the flowers and leaves and then Berlin Lois said we separate them and make a we record them and then we make a separate separation reports show I think you talked about that too what I tend to do for something like a flower something that has oils that might transfer or something that's super crumbly and real like a pressed flower is make a little mylar envelope tuck it in the mylar envelope and put the mylar envelope back where it came from yeah then there was Michael said how accurate our smart phone looks measurements I'm sorry can you read that again how accurate our smart phone looks measurements I have never messed with that so I do not have a good answer for you I think if you take the time to calibrate the smart phone looks measurement it's probably okay and then there were several questions about magnetic pages one about to freeze or heathen to remove the stick of stuck items one about using a heated scalpel another about whether or not you should use dental floss what do you recommend okay so there are lots of schools of thought on this I know lots of people like dental floss I know lots of people like heating things up personally I use a micro spatula and if you don't have a micro spatula with collections you should order like 16 because they're the best tool ever so I use a micro spatula to lift them and if I'm encountering resistance I put the book away for a year and come back and try it again and wait for the adhesive to fail because I worry about the residue that would be left behind if we heat it up and I've never used the whole dental floss thing I think it sounds much more difficult than a micro spatula I think that's something that might have been created by people who don't know what micro spatulas are no I mean and I do use dental floss to cut cheesecake though so there you go Rachel Barber says my historical society is the happy recipient of a local historian's collection of photographs business letterhood, advertising materials etc well sorted by geography and subject matter he used a wallpaper sample book as well as regular scrapbooks with paper pages he used cellophane tape for all four corners to attach them should we try to remove the materials from the books or do you have another suggestion okay so if everything is put in with cellophane tape over time cellophane tape is going to fail it just that's cellophane tape tends to go fairly quickly so probably I would use my micro spatula to see what I could do it's going to depend on the time you have but I might so I don't know it's hard and it's hard without seeing it there's a certain charm to having them in the wallpaper books for as long as you can have them there because that says something about the creator too but if you're going to take it apart now and the adhesive isn't failing but he just taped across the four corners and I guess I would want to know if he did it with little loops of tape so that it's neat and tidy and the tape doesn't show or if he just slapped tape across the corners because if they did that you could use a scalpel blade and slit that tape and pull it apart but eventually that tape is going to fail and it might be easiest to wait to take it apart then if that's your call you could also do a digital copy of the pages because it sounds charming and as before you take it apart make sure you have a copy of it Melissa Thompson in Wichita says I'm consulting with a women's club that is preserving their old albums but they refuse to reformat they won't remove objects either and they want to display them Any suggestions? Well so reformatting does not necessarily imply destruction but I would go back to them and urge them to take photos because that's not going to damage the album Ultimately it is their object and they're going to do what they want to with it as far as display I'm assuming I love women's club scrapbooks the most they're my favorites For display I would encourage them to take the ties or posts out of the scrapbook so you don't have those pages bent and just display them as stacks of pages I think that still gets the point across in terms of removing things from the albums It's hard to talk about something as complex as albums without seeing them and if you want to shoot me some photographs by email I am happy to take this discussion offline too I try not to remove things from albums that have a whole lot of craft to them unless there is a really pressing reason to do it Melissa said she'll be in contact taking photographs Rachel Barber asked how would we remove photographs from the black paper like in your slide If they're glued on both sides If they're glued on both sides you're probably not going to If they are really really really sturdily attached chances are there's not much you can do about it I'm really sorry to be that person that has to tell you that If they're in photo corners you can just pop the photos out gently But when stuff is glued down even photo conservators probably don't want to get into un-gluing those I've heard that the gold edging on photo albums flake and it's bad for they cause damage to photos I could see where potentially it might scratch things Also you're probably stuck with it because it's there You might before you open the album hold it tightly closed and use a soft brush like a HAKE brush which is H-A-K-E They're inexpensive brushes made out of bamboo and goat hair that are good for dusting and just give that a dust to get any loose particles off before you open the album and use it Okay I've lost my place Okay Sarah Brower says now Michael Nagy again What about modern scrapbooks made with craft store materials and kits in the last 30 years but still popular right now, the scrapbooker stuff Oh yeah I just treat that like I treat any scrapbook Where we're lucky is that the scrapbooking industry seems to understand that acid free is a good marketing tool When something is marketed as acid free it means that it's acid free at the time of manufacture so that's not a guarantee it will be acid free for the long haul But yeah, if people are making scrapbooks now I tend to encourage them to use materials that have passed the photographic activity test which I didn't really talk about today but it's kind of a it's a chemical test that ensures that there's nothing in your paper that's going to be damaging It's going to chemically interact with your photographs It's going to be nice and sturdy But again, it's one of those people that are going to do what they're going to do to deal with the after effect when it comes into your collections So I treat them just like I treat any other scrapbook and hope that they may last a little longer because the manufacturers knew that if they marketed something as acid free and quote unquote archival which has no meaning Archival means something found in an archives Anything could be archival But if they're marketing it as something that's quote unquote archival and acid free, hopefully it's going to last a little bit longer I'm going to join two questions together Victoria Estes says How would you preserve scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and photographs glued on the same page slip acid free paper between the pages or try to remove But Julian Novakovic in Rochester said we have some scrapbook albums, mostly photographs with some newspaper clippings and other camera on black acidic paper from the 1890s to the 1920s that were interleaved with paper in the 1980s However the pages have swelled and this warped the bindings I've removed the interleaved papers for now but what supplies would you recommend for interleaving the papers and I put those together because I think they're related Yes, so to the first question I would indeed interleave with photos, you would want something that is non alkaline buffered so something that is acid free and lignin free but non alkaline buffered because the chemicals could interact with the photographs For the other one it's another one where I would dearly love to see the album and you are more than welcome to shoot me some photographs If the album is sewn together we don't have as much leeway but if it's laced, we can loosen the laces so that there's room to put that interleaving in Yeah, and Berlin Lo has suggested using Mylar Any thoughts on that? You can use Mylar as well Mylar might be what you have at hand What about its electrostatic charge? I'm not particularly worried about it and when I would be worried is maybe one of the things in my album is pastel drawing then I would be worried about the static attracting the pigment from the drawing but if it's just newspaper clippings and photographs, not worried at all but that is an excellent question Yeah Okay Rachel when Pulizian I probably just now secured your name, I'm sure I have questions about postcard albums from the early 1900s The sheets are grey pages with four slots that hold postcards on four corners and some have leather covers, what's the best way to care for them? Should I remove anything? Also the way the albums are they only allow viewing of one side of the postcards so researchers can't take them and view the back sides without removing the cards How could we better use them? Should I digitize the cards in place and back in the albums? Carefully Rachel, I really like that suggestion I don't want your researchers really no way pulling the cards out of the albums The other thing you could do is photograph each of the pages and then just take the albums apart Hang on to the albums so anyone who wants to can see what they look like and put the postcards in boxes that are sized for postcards That would be another option How do we separate photos of stuff together? That is a really tough one That is not something that usually happens well and it is something I would refer to a photo conservator Amanda says When turning pages what about books in exhibit cases that are hard to get to? Should we remove the book or make a copy of the page to display over it? I had exhibit cases that are of pain to use What I might consider doing there is displaying the book closed and a good photograph of the page I don't know if that would be an acceptable solution but it would certainly be one from a preservation perspective it would be a good solution Sherry Klein said Working on preserving three library scrapbooks When a peer surfing created with Elmer's glue does not appear that the photos will be able to be taken out Any suggestions after digitization? I would just handle it like I would handle any other scrapbook and put it in a box and store it flat Elmer's has a tendency to fail after a while so it may be in five years you can get things out but yeah just digitize and then I was going to say throw gently put things in a box and store it flat We have early we have early city directories that are used regularly and some spines are detached Is there a way we can stop further damage while still allowing access Currently we don't have the resources to digitize Oh man City directories are so heavily used that they're almost always in poor condition What I think I would do if at all possible is try to track down duplicate copies and allow people access to the one that's in poorer condition and restrict access to the one that's in better condition and let the poor condition one get torn up And there are a lot of places that have digitized city directories People like the Mormons in Salt Lake City and you can access their materials for nothing So that might be something you might want to check into too You might look and see if somebody else has already digitized them It's entirely possible Yep, you are correct Susan Samantha Schaefer in Canadian Texas If anyone's interested in seeing all sorts of crazy interesting scrapbooks I follow at Paper of the Past on Instagram So that might be something that you want to look at Rachel Barber says thanks for the answering We are so charming when we have 15 boxes of wallpaper not so charming when we have 15 boxes of wallpaper sample books and scrapbooks with everything taped to the pages That's part of the problem But I think is that the information contained on the items tagged into the books is not so easily accessible so she'll send you pictures And Sarah Brower says we have an autograph collection with letters and papers interleaved and attached to pages of books The creators stated specifically in his will that the autographs were not to be removed from the books We don't know if he had a reason for placing the autographs and letters as he did There's no way to remove the autographs without damaging the books There's no deterioration of the books These are autographs of famous people and we have about 20 of them into the book I think I would probably just box them so that if anything fell out you would know where it was But you have a restriction on them that you aren't allowed to take things out So I would just box them and love them like they are and if people ask you tell them that he was an eccentric donor Ishtel has recommended several times using Gore-Tex to help humidify things to remove them What are your thoughts on that? I get I've never used Gore-Tex to get adhesive damp to remove it I get really nervous recommending willy-nilly to non-conservators that they start humidifying things because things can go wrong If you're going to experiment with it make sure it's on something that you understand that you can do damage and that you're okay with that Otherwise, put it in a box is always a valid solution You could ask a photo conservator but the problem with photographs is they can be kind of quirky so you want to be really careful about that and you could find yourself out on the limb with nowhere to go Photos are scary Samantha Shaffer says again we have an exhibit on loan with rare books that we did Some of the books are displayed closed and photos of pages were blown up and displayed on poster boards I think that's a lovely solution to the we can't get into the case to turn the page question There have been a couple of people who have said that directors made them into PDFs I think I saw a suggestion about photocopying also pass along and that might be a good way to handle because there wasn't a budget for digitizing the city directories but maybe a volunteer could stand and make photocopies of the pages which would be tedious but it would allow you to cut down on access Timothy Walsh says the scanner pro iphone app by reedle provides excellent results in PDF format it's fast and easy to use I'll look that up I can add it to the resources and then let's see and then a couple of people have given places where you might find city directories and what about a scrapbook where the contents have been loosed from the pages already and it's a wide variety of types of materials like papers, clippings, cards, photos leave it all in place and then you can put it in the book or remove it and store it separately that's a really interesting question and I guess my question is do we have an idea of where things originally were on the pages if they're already random and jumbled then I don't see any reason to not just take them and put them into file folders that might be by page if you know where things were on the page you might just take put things where they were and take pictures and then have the photographs and put things in folders that might be the easiest there's one question I forgot what do you do about books you know places that no longer have their collections on stacks but have thoughts you know I have absolutely no experience with those so I don't have a good answer for you I'm hoping that anything rare or special that you're using some kind of a robot system for to have boxed because that will protect them a lot of damage and for circulating collection books I just have a really hard time getting worked up about anything because my assumption is that they will be used until they die and then thrown away Ashley Kowalski says we have a small number of older books that are captain's collection storage rather than because of author's signatures or rarity they're currently laid flat on shelves and sometimes two or three are stacked there's no feasible there's no longer feasible space would it be better to box and stack many on flat shelves or box and store standing so the question there Ashley is going to be if something is oversized or not if something is normal book sized then box it and let it stand on its end that's how they were designed that'll work great if something is oversized I would want to see them boxed and flat and in my dream world maybe you'd investigate adding some shelving you you can go in and add more shelves to it is adjustable shelving and that might be a way to make it so you don't have to stack things ten high yeah and there have been a lot of suggestions for Sarah about city directories and Randy Reese says that the Los Angeles public library has digitized Santa Monica city directories and I think that's about it I'm pretty sure we've answered them all so that's great thank you all thank you Rebecca this was so much fun and I want to remind you about the next webinar and if you don't have animals but you know people that do have animals please tell them about that webinar and we have the American zoological and aquarium folks are giving it and what I've learned is that many places they might have a cat or anything to a lion or something and they have an emergency and they just let the animals out so you don't want to do that I told your animal shelter Susan right you can't move them so please make sure that you that you do that so we'll see you next month and I hope you're all enjoying the summer bye bye