Enabling preservation

Construction of the Mansueto Library made it possible to expand the space available to the Preservation Department and, as a result, to acquire additional, state-of-the art equipment for the conservation and digitization of collections.

“The kinds of things we can do now were almost unimaginable before Mansueto,” says Preservation Librarian Sherry Byrne. “From washing paper to safely and more rapidly scanning fragile bound manuscripts, our new equipment will allow us to make the Library’s collections more usable and more widely available to students and scholars, here and around the world.”

Conservation: preserving materials in their original formats

Charged with meeting the conservation needs of millions of print volumes in the Library’s collections, as well as maps and other flat works on paper, Head of Conservation Ann Lindsey is delighted by what she can do with her new equipment.

A recently acquired suction table is allowing Lindsey to clean, flatten, and mend large materials, such as a map of Fuzhou, China, printed between 1860 and 1911. By laying the item on the table’s flat, perforated metal surface, covering it with a clear plastic dome-shaped top, and connecting it to a powerful vacuum, she is able to control humidification precisely and undertake aqueous and solvent-based treatments while protecting the original paper and ink.

New fume hoods allow for the use of organic solvents to remove tape and reduce stains. A special sink allows staff to wash degradation products from paper.

And, as a result of the expanded space, the Preservation Department has been able to obtain 7 ft by 11 ft tables that allow staff to clean, stabilize, repair, and otherwise treat very large materials on library premises for the first time. A 19th-century map of Paris’s arrondissements, early 20th-century maps of Chicago neighborhoods, and giant Soviet propaganda posters from the 1930s are a few items treated since these tables arrived.

This new equipment supplements other tools long held by the Library that have remained substantially unchanged in their design since the 19th century or earlier—book presses, a board shear, and sewing frames are used to repair or create new bindings for books, often with historically sympathetic materials.

Digitization: scanning collections and making them freely available online

Preservation staff members are part of the Library team that is facilitating the digitization of UChicago volumes as part of a partnership between Google and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation.

But not all of the Library’s materials can be digitized by Google. Rare books, manuscripts and archives from the Special Collections Research Center and oversized and fragile materials from the Library’s general collections are among the items that are candidates for the Library’s own local digitization program.

The Library began digitizing materials using flatbed scanners and making them freely available online in 1997. In 2005 it acquired a Better Light 4×5 digital scanning back camera, allowing it to undertake digitization of rare and fragile materials such as the Goodspeed Collection of 5th- to 19th-century papyri fragments and New Testament manuscripts, and the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae engravings of Rome and Roman antiquities.

With the opening of Mansueto, Head of Digitization Kathleen Arthur added a Zeutschel scanner that can more rapidly digitize large bound volumes in a face up position, preventing damage to a book’s pages and spine. A number of major projects using the Zeutschel will begin in the 2011-12 academic year, including the scanning of bound manuscripts from a number of archival collections held in the Special Collections Research Center.

Among those underway are Lincoln manuscripts from the William E. Barton Collection of Lincolniana and bound manuscripts from the Chicago Committee of Fifteen—records gathered for an investigation of Chicago crime focusing on prostitution and the illegal sale of alcohol (1908-1911). A collection of more than 300 Russian satirical journal issues published during the Russian Revolution of 1905-1907 and currently held in Special Collections will also be digitized.

From the Fall 2011 issue of Libra