INTRODUCTION
Trends in library conservation policies and techniques since 2000 have had a substantial impact on emergency preparedness and response. Many of these changes have resulted from an increased emphasis on prevention over intervention. This transformation reflects a shift toward digitization and collaborative collection development, which has reshaped library collecting policies. The most important factor in book and paper conservation is the presence of water, whether in the form of humidity in the air, rain from the sky, a leaky pipe above the ceiling, rising damp though the foundation, or storm surge from a hurricane. This chapter highlights new developments in the field of library conservation, including the conservation of books, paper, and photographs. Preservation of audiovisual and born-digital media is beyond the scope of this chapter; however digitally-printed media are included as prints on paper.
Conservation treatments in this chapter are discussed in sufficient detail to permit readers to understand their advantages and disadvantages in comparison with other treatments; they should not be considered recommendations or endorsements of any individual treatment. Specific treatment instructions can be found in some of the references cited, but the methodologies might not reflect current standards.
While supported by traditional peer-reviewed literature, this chapter also relies upon conference proceedings and online open access journals in order to achieve a better balance between book and paper conservation. Since 2000, most mainstream peer-reviewed articles on library material conservation have addressed general preservation and paper conservation, rather than the hands-on conservation treatment of bound volumes.
BACKGROUND
The 1966 flood of Florence’s Arno River is widely credited with creating the modern field of library conservation. Certainly, there was a previous generation of art conservators, some of whom served as “Monuments Men” during World War II, and founded many of today’s professional organizations and training programs for art and artifact conservation (Edsel 2013, 2014).However, the response to the Florence Flood galvanized the library conservation community, during an era when the systematic preservation of artifacts was just beginning to take precedence over restoration and craft traditions.
Early conservation efforts tended to focus exclusively on rare materials, leaving most library materials in mending or book repair programs that did not adhere to standards for preservation. In 1990, the Research Library Group articulated a strategy for collections conservation as part of a general preservation program. Collections conservation was driven by use or circulation and condition (Merrill-Oldham Schrock, 2000). Discussions about the state of library conservation in the 1990’s addressed the trend toward rehousing as a substitute for invasive treatment and the tension between reformatting and “the book as artifact” (Fredericks, 1992). In 1992, the Library Collections Conservation Discussion Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) began to expand the discussion of processes and techniques for circulating and non-rare materials with a collections approach, rather than the single-item method typically presented at AIC meetings. The focus of the collections approach was to establish protocols and specifications toallow a library to sort items into batches, based on the pre-defined parameters for a finite range of treatments. (Grandinette Silverman, 1994). The principal role for the conservator in such a conservation program was to set standards and to provide guidelines for their application.
In recent years, there has been a growing appreciation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cloth cased bindings. Most public libraries had already weeded these books on account of their age, yet many of them have remained in academic libraries. Unfortunately, research librariesin the twentieth century frequently categorized these books as non-rare, so many of them were rebound as part of standard collection maintenance programs (Silverman, 2007). To ameliorate this problem, research libraries have created new workflows for rehousing or transfer to off-site storage for this group of “medium-rare books”(Baker and McCarthy, 2006).
Most treatments have continued to follow established models, using time-tested materials and techniques. New treatments have been sought to address persistent problems for which no good solution had been found in the past. Conservators and conservation scientists have investigated techniques for strengthening paper, as well as techniques that might make paper less acidic. Consolidants for flaking and friable media were tested. Researchers evaluated methods for stabilizing unstable iron gall ink. Conservators attempted creative solutions for the repair of leather bindings, while continuing to amass evidence that leather dressings were usually ineffective and/or harmful. Conservators tended to be somewhat cautious about applying unknown materials to objects of value. As a consequence, many new treatments represented incremental shifts from past practices, rather than radical departures from existing norms.
Since the 1970’s, the conservation literature has placed heightened emphasis upon analysis of artists’ materials or investigations of new materials. A bias against publishing information about “standard treatments,” has made case studies of traditional procedures rather scarce (Brown & Bacon 2001). This means that unique and novel materials and techniques have been more strongly represented in the conservation literature than in actual practice.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN CONSERVATION
Shifts in Collection Storage
New developments in storage, circulation, and housing have provided conservation options for many collections that permit non-treatment or minimal treatment. Recent peer-reviewed articles have discussed the movement toward off-site storage. This type of housing has freed large collections from the limitations of storage in a space that is designed for human comfort, rather than preservation. A revolution in storage has been precipitated by the growing role of digital resources as surrogates for print materials. Another enhancement to storage was the wide array of microclimates made from high-tech materials that could help to protect the item by blocking or absorbing harmful chemicals.
For many institutions, the move toward off-site storage was initiated with serials collections, due to the quantity of bound volumes that could be relocated efficiently. Cataloging staff needed to collaborate with other departments to accomplish the relocation of these collections, but the procedure was largely driven by the catalogers’ ability to describe batches hundreds or thousands of items in a single bibliographic record. The largest task was the verification of the actual physical holdings (Ilik, 2012). In some collaborative off-site storage projects, consortium partners agreed to fill the gaps in the holdings of consortium partners, while reserving the option to weed any duplicates from their own collections. For example, the Duke University storage facility has a partnership with the University of North Carolina; 41% of 604 foreign language health science journal titles were found to overlap between the two collections. The two libraries had 11% partial overlap with complimentary holdings. Retention decisions were guided by the condition assessment for all duplicated items. Individual volumes were bar-coded either by direct attachment or by attachment to acid-free paper strips, depending on the imprint date or physical fragility of the items (McKenzie, 2007).
Over time, most of these consortia moved from collecting journals to collecting monographs. The University of California system was established in the 1980’s as the first consortium-based off-site storage depository (Payne, 2014). This project managed two regional facilities, with low-use, paper-based collections from Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco campuses in the Northern Regional Library Facility (RLF), and the collections of the Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and San Diego campuses in the Southern RLF. Originally conceived as off-site storage for each campus, the facilities were not intended as shared collections. A Distributed Collection Model (DCM) has been established to manage holdings, incorporating the availability of digital counterparts for some physical items, versus physical items without digital counterparts. The libraries have begun to move toward a shared, collaborative collection, by creating clear criteria for selection as a planned, rather than a “coincidental” collection (Schottlaender, 2004).
The Washington Regional Library Consortium (WRLC) has interfiled its collections on the shelves and listed them in a union catalog as a single “branch.” This meant that the individual libraries had to embrace shared stewardship, obligating partners to preserve their unique holdings, while permitting them greater freedom to weed holdings duplicated by partner libraries (Payne, 2014). It is not clear what provision has been made to ensure that all partners are devoting adequate resources to preserving the “last copy” in the consortium.
The partner libraries of five colleges repository in Massachusetts have donated their collections to the consortium, with ownership residing in the consortium, rather than the originating institution(Payne, 2005). As a member of the Association for Research Libraries (ARL), the University of Massachusetts needed to keep a separate collection in order to maintain a high volume count for its ARL statistics. Unlike other collaborative collections storage facilities, the Amherst College Library depository was begun by a small liberal arts college, not a state library or a large research library. Amherst was able to repurpose a surplus military bunker in 1993 at a very reasonable cost. Owing to its previous use, the building had thick walls and floors that provided an ideal interior temperature of 50-52°F year-round (Bridegam, 2004). This meant that Amherst could offer to host the Five College Library Depository as a cost-effective preservation facility, rather than constructing a new building to house the consortium’s collections.
Other consortia have a de facto repository, by virtue of policies prohibiting duplicates; however, partners retain ownership of their respective collections. They simply agree to extend full borrowing privileges to consortium members. The future of collaborative collection development and storage will be shaped by the use of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Worldcat database as a tool for analyzing and comparing library holdings across individual institutions and consortia (Genoni, 2013).
These policies raise the question of how many duplicates are needed nationally or internationally. Nadal and Peterson (2013)determined the number 26 as the minimum quantity of copies needed to ensure preservation and access. More importantly, the question of preserving the “best copy” is extremely problematic in many of the libraries that choose to weed their collections on the basis of duplicates residing in these repositories. The large state research university or the well-heeled private research university that has agreed to permanently preserve its copy of a work may not have the most complete copy or the copy that is in the best condition. In the current workflow, the collections that are not consortium partners are not surveyed to discover the copies that might actually be those most worthy of preservation in such a repository.
One challenge identified by members of the Library Collections Conservation Discussion Group was the difficulty of selecting the best copy for the repository, even when conservators are available to assist in the process. In one case study, there was no system for comparison of print resources from different member libraries. Preservation staff members have found it difficult to convince librarians to offer their best copy for preservation in the repository; instead the librarians preferred to circulate the best copy, while storing a damaged copy in the repository(Baker McCarthy, 2006).
Existing workflows can provide a baseline level of collection care as items are transferred to off-site storage. For example, materials in the Nebraska Library Depository Regional Facility (LDRF) were cleaned with a HEPA vacuum upon arrival at the facility. Collections were assessed for insects, mold, and structural damage at the same time(Pearson Busch, 2007). Many conservators involved in the Library Collections Conservation Discussion Group had delegated minimal repairs to trained students or to cataloging staff. Many libraries relied on shrink-wrapping or vacuum sealing to stabilize damaged volumes in lieu of treatment (Baker McCarthy, 2006).
Regardless of the selection and assessment problems inherent in the existing consortium models, conservation concerns have played a major role in the development of this type of facility. The “Harvard model” is followed by most libraries, with collections sorted and organized according to physical size, rather than call number (Payne, 2014). This manner of shelvingpermits adjacent volumes to support each other in trays on the shelf, whereas tall volumes would have been distorted whenflanked bysmaller books.
A desire for more flexible library study space has had a significant influence on the relocation of collections in recent years, yet this development has great potential to enhance collection care. In addition to structural preservation, the off-site storage facility can provide passive conservation, mitigating against the agents of deterioration: light, heat, and humidity. The ReCAP facility, housing collections from Columbia University, Princeton University, and New York Public Library, was built specifically with a preservation objective. The partner libraries sought a cost-effective preservation environment with stricter climate control than was feasible in the traditional library (Payne, 2014).ReCAP began with completely separate collections, neither interfiled on the shelves nor integrated in the catalog. The off-site collection storagehas also become a means of providing continuity of service after disasters that might affect the individual institutional libraries (Kuzyk, 2007).
Disaster response in these facilities could be difficult, due to the scale of the buildings and the density of storage. Leaks might be not be detected easily. One off-site storage unit was equipped with catwalks to permit staff to reach upper shelves without an order picker. Glow-in-the-dark tape on shelves and contrasting-colored storage trays were used by some libraries to facilitate identification and triage of special collections that might be dispersed into different parts of the facility (Baker McCarthy, 2006).
Occasionally, the movement of personnel to off-site storagehas accompanied the transfer of collections. For example,the University of Florida relocated its Preservation Department to off-site storage in 2008. The construction of improved, purpose-built conservation labs and other preservation facilities, such as digitization studios, justified the relocation of the preservation departments to the off-site storage facility, according to survey respondents at 19 ARL institutions where conservation labs had been moved to off-site storage (Martyniak, 2010). This conservation lab location would facilitate the routing of damaged materials to be conserved before or after they were requested by patrons (Baker McCarthy, 2006).
Passive Conservation or Active Housing
Passive conservation or active housing incorporates physical and chemical methods to reduced the need for conservation treatment. Sheets of zeolite-containing boards were enclosed in shrink-wrapped packages books being transferred tohigh-density storage (Baker McCarthy, 2006). Studies from the 1990’s suggested that zeolite-containing papers preferentially adsorbed air pollutants, but it was not clear whether the zeolites inside of paperboard products would provide better preservation of chemically unstable papers housed with those paperboards. In sealed packages with newsprint, resin-coated silver gelatin photographs, and other papers, the efficacy of zeolite-containing boards was notdemonstrated conclusively; however the boards have been shown not to cause harm (Schaeffer, Druzik, Norton, 2004).
Marvelseal 360 a polyethylene, aluminum, polyester film laminate has been used to seal small microclimate framing packages. Parchment documents have been housed in this type of sealed package in order to prevent distortions caused by humidity fluctuations (Hepworth Michelozzi, 2004).Marvelseal 360 has been used as a backing sheet for “passepartout” framing packages that contained silica gel-impregnated sheets to maintain a specific level of relative humidity (Norton & Furuhata, 2006).
A study by the Image Permanence Institute (IPI) established that delignified wood pulp papers were adequate substitutes for cotton rag papers in the storage of photographs. The study also demonstrated that air space in a box diluted the off-gassing of harmful contaminants from lignin-containing box boards, yet damaging conditions continued to exist inside the box. The dilution effect varies based on the capacity of the box, and there is no standardized “safe” level of lignin for boxes (Burge et al 2002).
There are many institutions that may have invested in acid-free, lignin-free, protective enclosures for photographs, while continuing to use lignin-containing boxes. According to the IPI, the collecting institution should place a higher short-term priority on improvements in temperature and humidity than replacing existing boxes. The environmental improvements will retard the deterioration of the lignin-containing box-board and contribute to the preservation of the box’s contents (Burge et al 2002).