"A poisonous insecticidal solution has been used in the binding of this book."

Update:  according to this UNESCO publication from 1961 (“Preservation of Books and Periodicals in Arab Countries” by Wilfred J. Plumbe), that poisonous insecticidal solution is likely a solution of 1% mercuric chloride and  0.5% beechwood creosote applied to the adhesive used on the spine of books before casing in (pg. 6).

I nearly broke out in hives while Conservation Online was down last month. Let me rephrase that: I nearly could not do my job or make any important conservation-related decisions while Conservation Online was down in late July – early August. I made a record of all the “CoOL” things I needed to do in a single morning during this dark period:

• Needed to look up an email on the PADG listserv? Only on CoOL (PADG is hosted by ALA, but sure enough the archives are not available / searchable through the ALA website …)
• Needed to use CoOL’s “Finding People” directory of nearly 10,000 conservation professionals from around the globe? Only on CoOL.
• Needed to do some research about a product we were researching for use in some treatment workflows, and wanted to search across the pretty full scope of conservation lit, discussion groups, and professional output? Only on CoOL.

CoOL is now back up at what looks like a temporary server location. I’m not sure what the current timeline or status re: the move to AIC is as the last update posted on CoOL was on July 14, 2009 . Update: there’s a post on the AIC News website re: CoOL. I’m sure Walter and others are moving heaven and earth to get this singular resource back up and running, but I check the site near daily just to make sure it’s there. So I can work. And so I can sleep.

Today a colleague discovered that the Conserv-O-Grams site and the NPS Museum Handbook, both hosted by the National Park Service, is down. n. I hope this is simply a temporary and passing server issue, but I’m started the gong here — I wish I’d done this for the downtime of Conservation Online — just to show a rally of support for getting that much-needed resource back up and running. On 9/09/09, Conserv-O-Grams is down. If it isn’t back up by tomorrow, info will be posted here on who to contact at NPS to politely inquire about its status and to show support.  Update: as of 11:35 a.m. on 9/9/09, both sites are back up.  Thank goodness.

My personal thoughts on the whole Kilgarlin Center / UT Austin debacle coming real soon.  In thinking about the seven stages of grief — 1) Shock or Disbelief, 2) Denial, 3) Bargaining, 4) Guilt, 5) Anger, 6) Depression, 7) Acceptance and Hope — I think I’m about a 5.4-5.7 as of today. My anger and depression, you know, they’ve got a beat. I can dance to it.  Pretty major earthquake.  They don’t make hurricanes this strong.

Actually, I’m kinda waiting to respond to a formal announcement on this whole mess that I’m hoping that Dean Andrew Dillon of the School of Information will issue soon.  Oh, and I really hope it includes further details about the democratization of the elite field of conservation b/c I’m dying to make someone a superhero cape. While I’m not banking on this press release to be timely or to move me directly to the “hope and acceptance” phase, I am hopeful that another institution will see value in the direction the conservation studies track at the Kilgarlin Center was heading and will plunk it up and off and to a brighter and more supportive future.  Too bad, Austin is a great town in which to be young, culturally inquisitive, and poor.

More on that later.  Now, Friday night BBQ.

Maybe I am the last person to learn about this (update: maybe I’m the first?  Seriously, no one has blogged about this yet?), but I flipped open a Gaylord catalog this morning to find “Digitization by Kirtas Technologies: now being offer by Gaylord.”  This is pretty amazing for several reasons, chief among those being that a company has put a simply cost on the digitization of a “normal” (read: less than 300 pages, min size 4.5″x7″ / max size 11″x14″) book: $79.10.

Using their “state of the art robot technology” which employs an “automatic page turning and book handling system that’s gentler than the human hand,” they’ll also gladly digitize oversize books (monsters with more than 300 pages but less than 600 for $722), newpaper ($1.30/page), documents (depending on size, $.60-$6.00).  And if the whole we’re-selecting-books-in-good-condition-for-these-mass-digitization-projects issue and its implications pops up on your radar like it did on mine, Kirtas will need a bit more dough for those brittle items: “If your book requires special handling, there may be an additional fee.”

As overall pleased with this democratization of the capitalist cultural heritage digitization venture though I might be, I got a severe case of the giggles as I read through a set of bullets seeking to answer the vision quest that is the $64,000 question: “Why Digitize?

Why Digitize?

Provide a worldwide audience of researchers access to your collections

Protect your original collections from repeated handling

Increase the prestige and visibility of your institutional holdings

Turn your collections into cash by making the available for printing on demand through major online retailers

New uses for a/c vents:

Protect and Preserve: Mobile Art-Conservation Van Helps Save Treasures (Wired Magazine)
Stripping Away the Darkness as Murals Are Reborn (NY Times)

Slate has a great article on the difficult task of preserving plastic objects (from the first toothbrush to high altitude flight suits to Jeff Koons installations). Included is a great overview of the history of plastics and some simple explanations of why and how plastics degrade. And like any good article on plastics and conservation, there’s the fantastic link to my favorite line in movies, ever: The Graduate.

I last posted one year and one day ago.  During the past year, I changed jobs, moved to Washington D.C., ate a lot of chicken and waffles, did a lot of gardening, became wildly overcommitted in the professional arena, and tried to forget how to blog or that I even liked to in the first place.  I didn’t even read blogs, but I sure got into Facebook.  I watched too much TV and let my mind rot.  I left a job that I really loved, and I think I’ve had a bad case of whiplash, heartburn, and wanderlust ever since.

I hope to make this blog helpful to others while also satisfying my recently developed and seemingly unending need to “broadcast,” a la Twitter or Facebook, things I think are cool.  Or are not cool.  Heaven help me, I will leave you all with the intact illusion that federal employment is just as glamorous, uninhibiting, and nimble as we all know it to be.

Perhaps as best stated by the Backstreet Boys, “Rock your body right |Backstreet’s back alright!”

• 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.

I coordinated a “Collections Water Emergency Simulation” course last week for staff from nearly each of U.Va.’s 16 or so libraries. We could not have pulled this course off without the guidance of the fantastic Kara McClurken of SOLINET who provided the course instruction. I had never had the opportunity to go through a disaster simulation course before, and besides the occasional small scale disasters (100 books or less) in the various libraries at which I’ve worked, I lack the experience to teach a recovery simulation course for a medium (100-500 books) to large (500+ books) scale water emergency. The daylong course provided 35 participants the opportunity to review salvage issues, options, and procedures in the classroom in the morning and the thrill of getting hands-on experience doing salvage, evaluation, and recovery (not just air-drying and packing out for freezing or vacuum freeze drying, but also deciding if it was possible or more cost-effective to replace items rather than to recovery them) in the afternoon. See our photos!

I learned some valuable lessons. First, setting up this course — obtaining a tent and getting permission to set that tent up; moving several ranges of shelves from our stacks to an outdoor area; finding and then moving a 1,000 discarded books and other materials that you would find in library or archival collection (photos, maps, microfilm, archival documents, etc.); and then moving those heavy wet books to our recycling facility — was a tremendous task and took 100+ hours, I’d estimate.

Second, public relations and publicity for this course has to be considered well in advance. Note that the official title of this course was “Collections Water Emergency Simulation.” In our preservation lingo, you and I call this disaster recovery. The purpose of this shift in vocabulary was to distinguish the type of events that are truly disasters and imperil human life from the emergency events that affect inanimate things (as opposed to people). This new and improved title was guided by my library’s communication’s director, and I think it was a good idea.

We were very deliberate in the way we handled the fact that we had to destroy books in order to make this hands-on simulation possible. We posted signs around the tent to assure that the books used in the simulation were discards from the library and were withdrawn because of their poor condition or because they were low-value and uncirculated duplicates. I or one of my most excellent student assistants were on site at all times to answer questions of any curious or concerned on-lookers; we were at first worried that someone would try to “save” the books (which had to be out overnight and wet down several times the day before and day of). Rather, we found that folks were happy that we were providing this training to library staff and some even shook our hands with pride. We feel really good about the fact that we were able to recycle the wet books at the end of the simulation (U.Va. has a FANTASTIC recycling program).

The university’s news team caught wind this event and wanted to feature us in an article and video story. I love publicity for our growing preservation program, but I asked them to please focus on the hands-on recovery experience that was being offered to library staff … and not on the part where we hosed down and put mud on books. Essentially, I tried to convey how they could help us promote a good thing (the class the the valuable experience it offered library staff) and not amplifly the potentially inflamatory aspects. They did a great job covering the event, but unfortunately did not honor my request — a news story and video were released this morning. These were both promptly removed from the website as the news team had promised us a day to review the article for fact-checking and to make sure the article was on message. Unfortunately, that promise fell through, and before the story was removed several blogs picked up on the more scintillating side of the simulation and video of me merrily applying mud to books.

Was the course worth it? I’m trying to do the math in my head: a hundred plus hours of preparation divided by 35 very happy participants who now have superb training multiplied by today’s public relations crisis plus the humiliation of having to call several respected fellow bloggers to ask them to take down dead links to a poorly edited news story. Yes it was worth it. I just don’t know if I’ll do it again.