protection of the … seed record?

I will explain the radio silence from the past week shortly (or, as soon as I am officially allowed — it is $$good$$ news!), but right now I’m watching a 60 Minutes story about the Doomsday vault, a super cold storage vault for storage of seeds. Yes, seeds!

The Svalbard International Seed Vault was built by the Norwegian government into a mountainside on the Svalbard islands (just inside the North Pole) at a cost of $5m. Intended to preserve the planet’s crop diversity in perpetuity and “from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change.” (The 60 Minutes story reports that a seed vault in Afghanistan was pillaged for … not the seeds, but for the glass containers in which the seeds were stored).

This BBC report reveals that the seeds will be stored at -18C and that the surrounding permafrost will help keep the seeds at the appropriate temperature. Once the seeds are safely stored in the vault, humans won’t be needed to tend the seed bank. “If you design a facility to be used in worst-case scenarios, then you cannot actually have too much dependency on human beings” BBC quotes Cary Fowler, the Trust’s executive director.  Interesting!

 

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?

 

Post-blogging the NARA Annual Preservation Conference

Just back from 22nd Annual NARA Preservation Conference: The ABC’s of Modern Fire Suppression in Cultural Institutions. It was a really interesting one-day conference, and NARA does a great job of posting presentations online shortly afterwards (ahem!, PADG, AIC). Look here for a list of previous conferences, which include topics such as digitization / digital preservation / storage of digital surrogates in 2007 and environmental control in 2006. Among the best presentations this year were “Why Williamsburg Went Wet-Pipe” by Patricia Silence, Conservator of Exhibits at Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and “Low Oxygen Fire Suppression at the British Library” by Julian Taylor, Construction Project Sponsor at the British Library.

A couple presentations explored previous fires at cultural institutions and presented lessons learned from those fires.  Someone asked a great question: since a lot of cultural institutions don’t want these disasters in the news, how can we learn from their mistakes?  Other major / simple ideas that made it through my sleepy skull yesterday (getting up at 4:30a.m. and driving to D.C. for a one-day conference quickie is NOT a good idea):

1. Collections wet by fire suppression systems and fire trucks / fire emergency responders trying to put out a fire are better than charred, wet collections and dead staff and patrons. Takeaway: We already knew “that which burns never returns.” And while having a fire suppression system in a cultural institution sounds like a duh, here in Alderman Library we, guess what, have no fire suppression system — in the old stacks or the new stacks.  Apparently the thinking used to be that fire suppression systems should not be installed in libraries for fear of damage to collection in case of a system failure. Moral: A fire suppression system is better than none at all, both from a life-safety stance and a collections safety perspective.
2. Fire suppression systems do a better job of putting out a fire before it gets out of control and use less water than a fire truck /fire emergency responders (see the great “fire growth curve” in the Nick Artim presentation once it is posted on the NARA website or the time vs. HRR chart on the slide titled “The Role of Suppression on the Frederick Mowrer presentation). Takeaway: A response by your fire suppression system (rather than fire responder on a truck with a big hose) means fewer collection materials wet, or in the worse case, burned. Moral: A fire suppression system will most likely cause less water damage to collections than fire responders, and it will extinguish the fire at an earlier stage as well.
3. There is not yet consensus on a “best practice” type of fire suppression system. Compelling cases were made for wet pipe (Silence) and low oxygen (Taylor), and there were but a few kind words for dry pipe and enough chatter about problems with pre-active systems to make me nervous about the system in our still new special collections library. Takeaway: Why can’t we agree on something! Moral: If we all agreed on something, we’d never explore newer options made possible with emerging technology (oh, and yes, the world would stop spinning).

Just attending the conference with my two facility management buddies here in the library was a great thing: I’m invited to the inspection the wet-pipe system in our Fine Arts library next week (with the campus-wide facilities folks and the fire suppression contractor!), and we were exposed to a whole new set of worries re: fire suppression and our high density storage facility. Good times!

 

Jesus is my co-encapsulator

This gem arrived from California this morning.

 

Nicholson Baker: Debunked on the road from preservation martyrdom

Nicholson Baker, champion of all those wonderful but yellowing newspapers that those wretched libraries were once thoughtlessly tossing away in a policy of “destroying to preserve” (read Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper if you’re not catching my sarcasm here), has surfaced again. No longer is he the investigative journalist ‘Siva-ing’ or bringing to light and public discussion the questionable enterprises of otherwise do-gooder libraries in the name of preservation, access, and stewardship. Rather, it seems he’s traded in the role of artifact martyr (”pillaging his own savings, Mr. Baker purchased some 6,000 volumes of bound newspapers from the British Library …”) for a new hat as poster boy for user damage of circulating library collections.

Mr. Baker is now a user of Post-it notes as bookmarks, a keeper of more than a Nissan Sentra’s backseat full of the University of New Hampshire’s books in his Maine barn (”piles of Churchill; of Herbert Hoover’s postpresidential papers; war records, biographies, letters, diaries),” a user of microfilmed and online newspapers (!!), and an exemplary culprit in the proper care and handling of library collections (he “fumbled and allowed Hoover and Brittain to squirt from his grasp”).

Oh yes — and about all those newspapers he’d saved from certain extinction: “’I went a little over the edge,’ Mr. Baker said recently about some of his newspaper-gathering efforts, and he added that being able to send his bound volumes to Duke was ‘a blessing.’”

Check out the full article from the NYT, but also breeze through the publicly viewable discussion on the PADG listserv. The author “Concerned in Bethesda” provided me with my first and best laugh of the day: “Leave the poor artifacts alone I say!”

 

Do you remember where you were when you first heard this?

I don’t think I heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea until around April or May 1998. Alison and I were playing croquet in the front yard of our friends’ house on Macon Highway house in Athens, GA (the one with no shower and a lofted roof which made all that Brit rock sound so nice coming from their massive speakers). It was one of those magical days in Athens where a sunny day outside with friends turned seemlessly into a late night indoors and a 4a.m. walk home. We played that album over and over, first outside on the crappy boombox and then inside on those speakers booming through that shack of a house, and then put the speakers in the window so we could sit outside in the middle of the night and look at the stars.

I admit right now that I still don’t own a legitimate copy of this album; I was so poor at the time that I borrowed WUOG’s copy for two very guilty hours and illegally burned my first CD in my dad’s brand new CD-R drive. I also put as many songs from On Avery Island on that CD as I could, and despite the threat of consumer-grade CD-Rs having a lifespan of but a few years, that much used/abused CD-R plays just fine to this very day. I used my dad’s scanner to scan in the liner notes, and printed those out in color on his at the time brand new (but today total crap) inkjet printer.

My fondest memory of Jeff Mangum in Athens was not the Jittery Joe’s coffee shop show or when he’d join the 40Watt stage with Elf Power, but one late fall night in 2001 or so when I and a few founding members of GLAD (girl librarians are drinking) were walking home down Harris Street. Mangum and homeless Athens rapstar DJ Jazzy J(ay) serenaded us with an impromptu performance. It genius, of course, but also a side of that poor guy that doesn’t ever seem to be written up: hilarious, spur of the moment, and completely unforgettable.

 

Blogging of Tina Fey …

From Yahoo Buzz Log:

“Among the latest skits, it was host Tina Fey’s return to her old Weekend Update anchor desk that set the buzz afire. She took up the cause of Hillary Clinton and unleashed an inappropriate-for-family-media slogan, in effect “(Being a Formidable Woman) is the New Black.” Her in-your-face defense catapulted Fey into the top 3,000 searches, got her video embedded in blogs across the nation, and garnered the “30 Rock” star more searches than the current SNL cast combined.”

Tina Fey said “bitch is the new black” at 12:45 a.m. on Sunday, 2/24/08, and last time I checked, dearest Yahoo Buzz Index, the definition of bitch does not equal “being a formidable woman.” Wait, Yahoo Buzz Index doesn’t feel comfortable directly quoting Tina Fey’s supportive / empowering use of the bitch word, but ABCNews, NYTimes, and other media outlets wrote about the the famous “How do we beat the bitch” question asked of presidential candidate John McCain (which he not only dignified with an answer, but remarked that it was an excellent question). Note: Yahoo Buzz Log did not report on the McCain beat the bitch question, but just today they reported on another topic once close to my pop culture heart, The O.C., wherein they felt ok quoting “Welcome to the O.C., bitch!

Full disclosure: I hurried through an undergraduate English degree, and I never got over a love of words, particularly profane words, out of my system. I’ve transferred this affair from the intellectual realm to my earthly crushes on the word as recorded on various physical formats. I love to see serif type words deeply inset into soft paper and iron gall ink handwriting burning through letters, or all caps type on pre-WWII era Western Union telegrams. Toss a profane word into the mix and I just get childishly giddy. I’m working with 16mm news film this week (and last, and next), and I’m looking at corresponding transcripts and can nearly picture the news anchor’s words from the transcript to the magnetic sound strip that runs adjacent to each film frame. The nice things about words on the medium of the internet is that it is much harder to rip out the offending page, mark through the profane passage, to replace the original with the (family friendly fake definition) and get away with it for more than a measly forgettable web news story. Score: Tina Fey 3,000+ searches and the recordable medium of blogs and You Tube; Yahoo Buzz Index +/- 1 bitch.

 

New look (spring is coming, right?)

We like to frequently re-arrange furniture here at Do I Really, trying new layouts in the tiny rooms of whatever house we’re renting. For that matter, we like to frequently move to new rentals, having gone through eight or nine rental abodes in four cities in the past decade. In short, we like unannounced and cathartic change (but, lest you make any political assumptions, we are currently supporting Bitch is the New Black).

This will manifest in seasonal changes to the look of this blog. Fair warning!

 

That which burns never returns (or does it?)

Two burnination items caught my eye yesterday. First, the cover of the February 25, 2008 New Yorker has a sorta funny cartoon about the life of a book (author writes book, publisher agrees to publish book; reader buys and reads book; reader put book out with recycling; homeless man picks up book out of recycling and burns it for warmth).

Moments later, a promo for Out of Ashes: Recovering the Lost Library of Herculaneum popped up on our PBS HD channel. I can’t find a listing for any upcoming airings of this documentary, but the promo showed charred scrolls which would seemingly turn to dust if touched or if the wind blew just strongly enough:

“For 250 years, scholars have struggled to unroll and read a collection of 1,800 carbonized and crumbling papyrus scrolls found in the wealthy Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. In the 21st century, promising new multispectral imaging technologies-enlisted by the National Library in Naples and Brigham Young University-reveal text that has not been seen for 2,000 years.

…. Ironically, the destructive force of the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum preserved this collection of papyri; the library probably would have deteriorated if it hadn’t been carbonized and sealed under volcanic material.”

Interesting!

 

Congrats, Beth! An ode to you: tape’s continued evil!

Congrats to Beth who has joined the league of preservationistas fighting the good fight to establish preservation programs in lands where preservation formerly did not exist. I for one know how hard it is to put down the microspatula and sit one’s ass squarely in front of a computer for months on end (the whole conservation vs. preservation administration dynamic).  Beth, beers on me at AIC.

As a congratulatory tribute to Beth and her lifelong commitment to proving and communicating the evil of tape, may I present a special edition of Tape Is Evil: tape that has lost its stickiness when you really wish it would have just kept on keeping on:

These film boxes represent the tip of the iceburg that is my next grant project. In short, these sweet little yellow Kodak boxes contain reels (well, spools, or maybe just winds .. multiple spools or winds of film — uncored — in each box) of film from a local TV news station. But the labels on the outside of the box! The labels are the only thing we have to go on right now as far as the film’s actual contents and date, not being able to playback the film  at present. And of course the labels are taped on with that cheap cellophane tape (is that the right name for that type of tape, conservators?) — you know, the kind where the adhesive is quickly absorbed by the paper onto which it is placed (where it discolors the paper horribly as it dries up), and the plastic carrier layer just peels off. For the first time in my conservation loving life, I have never so wished that the tape had a bit more vigilance. Just a little more staying power and we could have firmly affixed labels instead of a nightmare mystery film situation! Oh the agony — tape is evil indeed.