Bulleted items

• My Morning Jacket has a song about sexy librarians: “ramble up the stairwell, into the hall of books / since we got the interweb these hardly get used.” I like this album, save for a few ridiculous jam band moments.
  
• I think I have a new favorite blog: bookn3rd. Unlike yours truly (who jetted for Athens at the first sign a Calc III requirement for the “English for Engineers” major … and a boy), bookn3rd finished the history of technology program at Georgia Tech. Great content plus an awesome blog design and she’s headed to London. Could this have been my life after Calc III?
• Speaking of destroying (and recycling) books: Turning the Page on the Disposable Book (The WaPo). “Amazingly, authors rarely ask what happens to their unsold books; perhaps they don’t want to know. What seems abundantly true to me, however, after almost 20 years in the publishing business, is that an increasing number of their books will be — and should be — mulched. We are living in the age of the disposable book.”
• Send books to Iraq. I usually don’t read anything that sweaty monster Christopher Hitchens writes, but I’m going to figure out how to get my library to send materials from our current journal and monograph de-dupping project to the start-up library at the The American University of Iraq—Sulaimani.

 

Turn on your book light. Let it shine wherever you go.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present unto you The Enlightenment: ” illuminates your shelf rather your soul. Made from plexiglass and lit by an energy-saving bulb, the lamp plugs into an outlet with a standard cord…

 

cryogenics, n. - or, how cold can you go with library stuff, really?

This blog post title is a tribute to a new conserv-o-blog on the block. Welcome The Vespiary, a great blog with an ever clever schema for post titles.

I’ll be spending a lot of time over the next few months in the same building as the UVa surplus property center and will undoubtably be posting some photos of soon-to-be-auctioned-off gems here at Do I Really. I just might have to rename this blog Don’t I Really Want to Buy That and Stick It In My Living Room? Here’s the kick-off: a cryogenic preservation system. Per the wikipedia entry, cryogenics is “branch of physics and engineering that involves the study of very low temperatures, how to produce them, and how materials behave at those temperatures.” As I snapped some photos, I was thinking (hyperglycemic-ally so, I should note) … what would happen if I tossed a time-capsule of 19th-21st century library collections materials in there? A couple books in various types of bindings, some documents representing everything from rag paper to western union telegrams, some CDs, 16mm b/w film with mag sound, some color photos and their negatives, and perhaps a few artifacts and paintings for good measure? Just how well “preserved” would these materials be when immersed in liquid nitrogen or helium?

I think the answer is fairly obvious: the liquid cryogens plus the organic materials and media would probably not interact well, thermal shock (mentioned in the wikipedia article) aside. But it was fun to think about snapping this beauty up and reserving a place for it in my new lab, just in case the next “phase” of conservation is cryogenics.

 

Way to go, Alpine AIC Angels!

I know that as soon as she has a chance to catch her breath, Beth will write all about the Angels Projects at the American Alpine Club in Golden, CO that took place last week after the 2008 AIC Annual Meeting in Denver. In the mean-time, MileHighNews.com has a great write-up of the project and the conservators who were so entralled in their volunteer work that they couldn’t put down their “painter’s pallet knife”-like microspatulas to grab a bite of lunch. I know the exact feeling, and wish I could’ve stayed in town and helped out!

I love this article because it not only gives conservation some great news exposure and better helps the public (aka, folks like my very own parents) to better understand the many facets of library, archives, and museum conservation activities, but it will also be a great prop for Beth to employ as she courts donors and grant agencies over the next few years to build a conservation program for the AAC. Preservation / conservation activities are always a “sexy sell” for fundraising (all those shiny tools, solvent submersions, and intricate hand skills). Add mountains, climbers, their ephemera, and heroic feats of sportsmanship, and a archival backlog of conservation need to the mix, and you have the recipe for conservation fundraising success.

 

Tech solutions to daily burdensome and time consuming preservation activities!

I’m ordering computers and accessories with end of year funding, and I’ve been doing quite a bit of research in hopes of finding new tech tools to make our lives easier in regards to those high volume and burdensome tasks we take on daily in Preservation:

1. barcode duplication
2. shelf preparation: call number labeling, pre-printed barcode placement, security strip placement, and bookplating
3. inventory control: or, charging the hundreds of items that arrive daily to Preservation IDs and discharging the materials we’ve treated, bound or re-housed. For example: when a book arrives for library binding, we charge the book to a dummy patron called “BIND” so that staff and users don’t just see that the book is charged and unavailable … they see a notification saying the book is at the bindery and will be available in two weeks, and have the option to ILL a copy from another library. We charge each type of treatment to its own workflow to facilitate recall retrieval and inventory checks. When the book returns from the bindery (with 400-500 or so other items every other Weds), we discharge it. Hundreds. Daily. Argh.

While many libraries just assign new pre-printed barcodes (to items after library binding or books after they’re re-housed in phase boxes), I found a combination of barcode printer, resin printer ribbons, and a vendor who sells blank barcode labels, that, short of hard testing data from LoC (why aren’t their materials testing results — made possible by our generous tax dollars — publicly available online??!!) I believe produce as permanent and durable a barcode as our pre-printed barcode labels. We use a Zebra TLP2824 barcode printer that uses thermal transfer printing. The Zebra website does a great job of clarifying the difference between thermal transfer and direct thermal printing:

“Thermal transfer printing uses a heated ribbon to produce durable, long-lasting images on a wide variety of materials. No ribbon is used in direct thermal printing, which creates the image directly on the printed material. Direct thermal media is more sensitive to light, heat and abrasion, which reduces the life of the printed material.”

We use the Zebra 5095 resin printer ribbons and 3-mil polyester with 1-mil acrylic adhesive labels (no laminate) from Data2. Anyone out there use a different combination of printer / label material / print ribbon that they believe to more permanent / durable?

I’m trying to find out if there’s such a thing as a network-able barcode printer (I want to hook our barcode printer up to one computer in the room and through IP printing print barcodes from any other computer in the room), and I’m looking at the TLP2824-Z. My tech support dudes are also doing so research, so I’ll report back. I should add that we use Labelview Basic to set up a standard barcode template and to facilitate printing. It causes me great pain that I was not able to get the standard Zebra barcode printing software to work as I wanted it to.

I don’t have any bright ideas of about shelf prep tonight. I abhor and fear our current call number labeling (Gaylord “Permaplus! paper labels that come in sheets to facilitate laser jet printing and vinyl “label protectors” … yes, vinyl). When I am queen of shelf prep (hopefully soon), the call number labeling process is first against the wall. What are folks using for call number labels these days (software, label materials, print processes, etc)? I have a fantasy that one day I will send a foil-back polyester label through my thermal transfer barcode printer to create a call number label that 1) permanently sticks and conforms to the spine of a book and doesn’t pop off (that’s the reason for the foil back, right?), 2) is printed using the highly durable thermal transfer printing process on a durable polyester label, 3) doesn’t require any sort of additional “label protector” and 4) can be quickly printed with the push of one button in my ILS.

Finally, let me present to you my greatest find of this whole investigation: I am pimping out our charge / discharge computer. We charge and discharge hundreds of items each day, and student assistants are chiefly assigned to this task … they don’t always notice when they mischarge an item for accidentally overlook an item and fail to discharge it. I guess that’s why 798 items were charged to the pamphlet binding workflow when I started: there were only 3 items on the pamphlet binding shelf, and the other 795 were in their place in the stacks. but still charged to Preservation. Anyway, three words: BLUETOOTH BARCODE SCANNER. I’m going to get a cordless bluetooth barcode scanner with a trigger (this one, I think), and it is going to change our lives. I’m also setting up a standing height monitor on a swing arm so the student using the wireless barcode scanner can swing the monitor to just above the booktruck and charge/ discharge each item with the cordless barcode scanner while looking at the computer monitor to make sure each item is scanned.   Shazaam!

Any advice or feedback on these products or processes from the peanut gallery? Any tech tips to facilitate preservation activities that anyone would like to share?

 

Jesus is my co-encapsulator

This gem arrived from California this morning.

 

Tonight I have three obsessions:

1. There Will Be Blood: I saw it Saturday night in a packed theatre. Amazing!

2. The soundtrack to There Will Be Blood.

3. This song. (Or, when that link stops working, this one (choose Conquest). And the one that came before it, by Patti Page.

A late-breaking fourth obsession to add to my roster: after tonight, the ugly mug of one G. W. Bush will not state our union ever, ever again. Amen!

 

One man’s Kindle is another man’s book satchel

The blogosphere is fetishing up Tom Stoppard’s book satchel, featured in yesterday’s New York Times Fashion and Style section. Now that we know what it looks like inside, I’d love to know what the how much the satchel weighs on its own … and what the sticker on the right side says.

A Little Suspense Travels a Long Way (NYT)

 

“I grew up wrapped in magnetic tape”

Giles Turnbull remembers Top 40 with reverence, talks about his dad’s vinyl collection, reminisces about reel-to-reel players, and admits, “and throughout, I stuck with tape” in a great essay for The Morning News:

“Had I been a vinyl collector, I’d be emotional about the objects themselves, the beauty of the sleeve artwork, the raw aural quality produced by groove and needle. But as a collector of tapes, I’m all too aware of the shoddy sound, the tendency to break, the tiny cramped inlay cards and squeaky noises from old transport mechanisms. The objects are cheap plastic tat; as it always should, the music matters most.”

Please Spool to End of Tape Before Playing Other Side (TMN)

 

Mesmerizing WikipediaVision (beta)

I could watch this for hours:

This update to “Baldness” (thanks, Middlefield, U.S. is perhaps only second to Auckland, New Zealand’s contribution to the entry “girls with guns.”

Immediate observation: most Wikipedia edits this evening seem to originate in the northeast U.S.