>> Welcome to the
50th anniversary
of the Preservation Research
and Testing Division.
It's hard to believe we're 50
years old, and thanks to Hans,
who popped into my office last
year and said, oh, did you know
that someone is writing a book,
and currently you
guys are 50 years old?
So we were pretty
excited about that.
I wanted to hand over, just
very briefly to Jake Nadal
who has been called amongst--
between multiple meetings,
but just wanted to pop
on and say a few words.
>> Thanks Fennella.
I won't hold up the proceedings
too terribly much, but first,
just to say thank you all
for being here, and my thanks
to everyone who has been
involved in this program
over the recent years,
and the last five decades.
It's, I think tremendously
important
that we have this capability.
The Library's ability
to actually do preservation
is substantial.
We have a large and diverse
set of divisions doing the work
of keeping the collections
accessible,
but to have a group here,
specifically focused
at a fundamental
level on understanding
if we're doing the work
of preservation the best
way it possibly can be done,
to help us think about new
methods, and new approaches
to treatment, is essential
for doing our work.
It also pays this tremendous
benefit back to the field.
Every year, I see presentations
being given not only
in venues we would
expect, like AIC,
but also in other scientific
meetings that build awareness
of heritage and cultural
preservation
in other disciplines.
It helps us bring new
information to ourselves,
as well as often times bring
interesting information
to allied fields.
We just, this Saturday actually,
had a wonderful program
on the glass at risk
project, right?
And I think if you had
asked me when I walk
through the door the first day,
how much time do you
think you'll be spending
about degradation of 19th
Century crystal flutes,
I would say, well none.
That sounds like a
Smithsonian kind of thing.
And in fact, it turns
out to be quite a lot
and we've learned a
tremendous amount about not only
that material, but one
of the library's most
distinctive collections,
and that's just one example of
many, where I think our ability
to do exploratory
research has led us
to some really engaging
findings, and has led us
to understand not only
how to do the work well,
but what the work
means, and in effect,
the meeting that I'm a few
minutes late here from,
we were just talking about
how important the work
of preservation is to the whole
scholarly purpose of the library
that we can answer questions
about fundamental materials
that inform the way
scholars and users
of those materials interpret
history and interpret the past.
We spoke at a colloquium
put together
by Dunn Barton Oaks last year,
about the Wayatsenko
[phonetic spelling], Kodaks,
and the Ostatique [phonetic
spelling] pack lands maps,
and research conducted
by our conservators
and preservation scientists
about the pigments used
to make those deeply informed
the scholarly community
about issues of interpretation.
Informed them about things
that they always
suspected might be true,
but that they could
never quite pin
down through the record
available to them.
And so our ability to bring the
point of view of a conservator
or scientist to the
interpretation and care
of these objects, I think,
not only helps us
keep things available,
but expands what
available means,
and how people interpret them.
And so I am glad we have a
little time this afternoon
to honor that and to give you
a chance to hear about the work
that is going on
in the division.
With that, I'll hand it back
to the division [laughs].
[ Applause ]
>> So today, rather than, I
could talk for three hours
about the really cool stuff
that we've been doing,
and even though I've
got a funny accent,
I've decided that's
really not what you want.
I want it to be about
the amazing staff we have
in the RTD.
And so, really what I'm going
to focus on is sort of going
through some of the changes
that have, from then and now,
and sort of the new initiatives,
and the way that sort of changed
and opened up over the last 50
years, and as many of you know,
I've only been here
about 13 years.
So that's more where
my knowledge is.
And then most of the
time, when we have tea
and coffee afterwards, all
the staff will be here,
and sort of showing some of
the amazing work they're doing.
So you'll get to
interact with them,
which is what I want
this all to be about,
a celebration of their work.
So the-- we did find
the original memo.
I was looking at the photocopy,
thinking I wonder what
condition their paper is in?
Thank goodness they
ditched [inaudible]--
so the press release in February
of 1970, which was talking
about a grant from the council.
Maybe resources to bring
in scientific equipment
to the library of Congress, and
this was really fascinating,
because this is what
they're talking about.
There are a whole range of
different types of materials
and we're still having trouble.
I love it, you know, keeping
abreast of how we deal with it.
I am thinking well, you know, I
guess it's job security for all
of us, and preservation,
and there was a mention
to William Barrow, as
some of you may know,
we had the Barrow
Collection here,
as part of our reference
collection, so that's phenomenal
to actually have that here.
And once we found it all, and
then just a range of issues
that continue to be a
challenge with that.
I love the fact that they want
the program to be national
in scope, with the
thought that, you know,
we really are doing this to
work with colleagues elsewhere,
and that we're going to draw
vitality from the interaction
with the greatest collection of
printed materials in the world.
Also the fact that
they're talking
about that collaborative
interaction
between everyone
working in the area.
So, I just-- we have all had
a wonderful chuckle about some
of the original images from
what the lab used to look like.
They can, the 1970s,
some of the equipment,
some of us are still not
quite sure what this was,
but I particularly love
the early computers.
And then this one I loved
because the dear old FO testers,
MIT FO testers, and guess what,
we're still using them today.
I suspect there may be one
or two original in there,
but it's phenomenal to
think some things change,
and some things stay the same,
which is really fascinating.
And then moving on to sort
of the new instrumentation
from their expensive
desktop to the portables,
to historic recipes, to the
imaging, sort of the number
of areas that you're
going to see more of,
as we move through
the fore today.
And so we have physical,
chemical,
optical and aging labs.
I always talk about the
upstairs and the downstairs lab,
which for some of you have seen
down to [inaudible] will get
the reference, but it's amazing
that we've got those
capabilities,
and we have that range of
instrumentation to work with
and to do the analysis, as
Jackson rightly pointed out.
I want to just do a
few acknowledgements.
I'm trying to stay
away from names,
because I know I will
leave people out,
but from when I arrived in
2007, there was a big push
to re-do the preservation labs,
and Deana Markham, Bob Dysart,
and Diane Van de Reiden [assumed
spelling] were incredibly
supportive of that.
Mark Sweeny, also, when I
started saying things about--
we have instruments
that are 12 years old,
and do you think we can put
like, a thing in the budget
for about $150,000 and he
didn't flinch too much.
But my colleagues, the
Preservation Chiefs,
Curatorial Staff, researchers,
PITD, and Conservation,
all of our colleagues at
LC are just so important
for how we make this work
and what makes us excited
about our work as well.
What I'd like to do is
hand over to Kathlin Smith,
who is a Director of
Communications at the Council
on Library and Information
Resources,
which is the now-CLIR,
and it was so exciting,
because I've been doing a lot
of work with CLIR to realize
in fact that they had the
prescience back in 1970
to actually fund and move
forward, and as you'll hear
from Kathlin's presentation,
LC and CLIR still work
very closely together.
So I'm going to hand
on over to her,
to give some summary of that.
>> Thank you Fenella, it's such
a pleasure to be here today
for this celebration and to be
invited to talk a little bit
about CLIR's early
involvement with the Library,
and the creation of
the Preservation,
Research and Testing Division.
The Council on Library
Resources,
CLIR's precursor organization,
came into being in
September 1956.
By coincidence, one week
after IBM released the
first commercial computer
with a hard drive.
The computer was bigger than
a refrigerator and weighed
about a ton, and the hard drive
stored a staggering 5 megabytes
of data, about the size of
an MP3 music file today.
It's hard to know whether the
Council's founders could have
imagined the profound
impact that this would have
on libraries within
just a few decades,
but I'm getting ahead of myself.
In its first year of operation,
the council awarded
just four grants.
One of them was to the
scientist, William Barrow,
for research into the causes
of book stock deterioration
and possible remedies.
And that time, libraries
worldwide were witnessing the
embrittlement of books
printed just decades earlier.
Barrow connected paper
embrittlement to the acids
and other elements in the
production of wood pulp paper
that started in the
mid-19th Century.
He asserted that
unless action was taken,
few of the books
published in the first half
of the 20th Century would be
usable in another 100 years.
To enable more extensive
and comprehensive scientific
research on book preservation,
in 1961, the Council established
the W.J. Barrow Research Library
and Laboratory in Richmond.
Early work focused on paper
permanence, de-acidification,
book bindings, and the
effects of temperature
and humidity on book longevity.
The Council funded
the lab until 1977,
a decade after Barrow's death.
But getting back
to the early 60s.
While Barrow's research already
led a handful of publishers
to start experimenting
with acid-free paper,
such publications were rare,
and libraries found themselves
spending growing portions
of their budgets on
microfilming at-risk materials.
It was clear that a
national plan was needed
for sharing the burden.
And in 1960, the Association
for Research Libraries appointed
a committee on the preservation
of research library materials
to develop such a plan.
The first task was to estimate
the size of the problem.
The Council commissioned the
state librarian of Virginia,
Randolph Church, to design
a method for sampling,
and Triangle Research Associates
to estimate the number of books
that would need attention
and by when.
The report from the
investigation estimated that 57%
of the titles in the
National Union Catalogue,
comprising some three
billion pages, were at risk.
There were two main approaches
to addressing the
problem of embrittlement.
One was to de-acidify the
originals, and store them
at reduced temperatures.
But this was relatively
expensive, so not practical
for entire collections.
Another, as noted
earlier, was microfilm,
which was less expensive, and
allowed for ease of duplication
and access, though
microfilm was the format
that most scholars
loved to despise.
A Council-funded study by
Gordon Williams, then-Director
of the Midwest Interlibrary
Center,
which later became the Center
for Research Libraries,
weighed the advantages and
drawbacks of these approaches.
And also identified photocopying
as a possible solution
for access.
Acknowledging that redundancy
of effort was expensive.
Williams recommended that
there be one national agency
to represent research libraries,
assuring the physical
preservation
for as long as possible.
Of at least one example of
every deteriorating record,
and that agency would
make copies
of those records available to
any library that needed them.
For years, the Library
of congress had been segregating
its badly deteriorated books
into a brittle books collection.
By the late 1960s, it was also
exploring the administrative
and bibliographic means for
assuring the preservation
of books for ongoing use
in the research community.
But problems of implementing
preservation solutions remained.
For one thing, there was
still no inexpensive method
for de-acidifying books.
And environmental
storage conditions needed
to be specified.
In 1967, the library
appointed Frasier Poole
as preservation officer
to organize
and develop a comprehensive
preservation program
that would serve the
country and planning began
for the preservation
research office.
Three years later, the Council
awarded $95,000 to the Library
of Congress, to equip
the new laboratory.
And by June 1972, it
was up and running.
Today, you'll hear
from my colleagues here
about the lab's trajectory and
the stunning array of activity
through the decades
that followed.
But I'd like to reflect
for a few moments
on the Council's trajectory,
and the broader preservation
environment
in which we find ourselves.
Through the 70s, and early
80s, the Council continued
to invest heavily
in preservation,
but its efforts took a
new turn in the mid-80s,
with the formation of the
commission on preservation
and access, under the
leadership of Patricia Batton.
Concentrating on the
Brittle Books Program,
the Commission sought to
expand awareness of the issue,
strengthen access systems,
conduct more fact-finding
studies,
and most importantly
obtain Congressional funding
for a nationwide preservation
microfilming program.
In 1997, members of the
Commission joined with the staff
from the Library and
other organizations
to testify before Congress
at a special hearing
on the Brittle Books Program.
As a result, the
appropriations bill
for FY1989 gave any age
12.5 million dollars,
of which 8 million went into
instituting a 20-year program
for microfilming three
million endangered volumes.
In the end, just over
one million volumes were
microfilmed, far
short of the goal.
This was, in part, because
of budget cuts at NEH,
but also because digitization
was becoming an attractive
alternative to microfilming.
Well before the Brittle
Books Program ended,
libraries were converting
significant portions
of their preservation
budgets to digitization.
But digitization brought a new
set of preservation concerns,
and in late 1994,
the commission joined
with a research libraries group,
to create the Task Force
on Digital Archiving.
Its groundbreaking report in
1996, written by Don Waters,
and John Garrett, noted, if
we are effectively to preserve
for future generations
the portion
of this rapidly expanding corpus
of information in digital form,
that represents our
cultural record,
we need to understand
the cost of doing so,
and we need to commit ourselves.
Technically, legally,
economically
and organizationally to the
full dimensions of this task.
Meanwhile, discussions
had been taking place
about the feasibility
of collaborating
to create a distributed
open-digital library.
With this aim in mind, in 1995,
the Commission joined
12 academic libraries,
the Library of Congress, NARA,
and the New York Public Library,
informing the Digital
Library Federation.
And the Commission served as
DLF's administrative home.
That same year, the decision
was made to merge the Commission
on Preservation Access, which
had started as a program
of the Council, back
into the Council,
to form a new single
organization,
the Council on Library and
Information Resources, or CLIR.
The merger was completed
in 1997,
under the leadership
of Deana Markham.
The challenges of
digital preservation
and access have remained
central to CLIR's efforts
over the past quarter century.
Today, CLIR's digital library
federation continues to grow
with more than 190 members,
a vibrant annual forum,
and 12 working groups, tackling
issues from born digital access
to digital scholarship.
CLIR currently awards some
four million dollars annually
to digitize hidden special
collections and archives
of high scholarly value, and
one million dollars annually
to digitally reformat
valuable audiovisual recordings
at high risk of loss.
We've also collaborated with a
library on more than a decade
of studies and publications
focused on the challenges
of recorded sound preservation,
as mandated by the National
Recording Preservation Act
of 2000.
We continue a robust
publications program,
and in late 2019, launched
a podcast, Material Memory,
which explores the effects
of our changing world
from digital technologies to the
climate crisis on our ability
to access the record
of our shared humanity.
Through stories and interviews,
we examine the critical role
that libraries, archives,
museums,
and other public
institutions play,
in keeping cultural
memory alive.
Finally, this spring, we will
join our project partners
in announcing a new
digital library
of the Middle East platform,
that will support the Federation
of Digitized Middle
Eastern Materials
from institutions
around the world.
While much of this activity
is focused on digitizing
for preservation and
access, we've been fortunate
to learn more about the
technologies, physical
and digital, that allow us
to ask new questions
of old materials.
Thanks to the work
of the Preservation,
Research and Testing Division.
For nearly two decades, CLIR
has run the Mellon Fellowships
for Dissertation Research
in Original Sources,
which promote creative
approaches
to original source research.
In 2011, as a new
aspect of the program,
we created a CLIR Library
of Congress Fellowship
to support original source
dissertation research.
This fellowship allows a PhD
student to work in the PRTD,
using tools and equipment that
would not otherwise be available
to them, to analyze source
materials in new ways.
And I'm so delighted to see
Marlena Cravens here today,
whose work she can describe
over at the table afterwards.
She is the current
CLIR L.C. Fellow.
While on the topic of
CLIR's ongoing collaboration
with he PRTD, I'd be
remiss if I didn't note
that the Division's
Chief, Fenella France,
who is a clear Presidential
Fellow, will start her tenure
as a CLIR Board Member
this spring!
We are so delighted!
The challenges that our
community faces seem
to get increasingly complex
as we steward rapidly
growing physical
and digital collections
at the same time.
We struggle to preserve not
just the material aspects,
but also their significance and
relationships to one another.
With often scarce resources,
and an impending climate crisis,
the risks of loss
to our intellectual
and cultural heritage grow more
dire with each passing year.
Despite all that we are facing,
the consciousness of the need
for strong leadership,
international collaboration,
and collective action to address
preservation challenges is
as strong as ever.
The world looks to the Library
for its direction and example.
The achievements and talents
of the people of this Division,
and most of all,
the generous spirit
with which you share
your talents with others,
are making a real difference.
We look forward to
continuing to support
and celebrate your
work for years to come.
Congratulations, and thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> And for those of
you who haven't been
on the CLIR website, there's
a lot of resources there,
so something a lot of
new podcasts and things.
So then and now.
We had a loop beforehand,
and I'll put it on again
when we finish sort of some
of the interesting photos,
but just some of the changes,
particularly over the last 15,
20 years, that have
been coming into play,
there is a strong move
towards materials analysis,
and then an acceptance that
we have a very diverse range,
my colleagues from Conservation
already know the diverse range
of materials we have.
But I remember when I
first came to the Library,
and people saying, "So, what
are you going to do there?
They have like paper and
what, some photographs?"
And there was just this
complete misunderstanding
of the richness of
the collections.
And I think that sort of seeing
the collections as a range
of formats, and all the
commensurate issues that relate
to that, those specific
challenges, you know, paper,
parchment, adhesives,
magnetic tape,
record out in the
original memo in the 70s,
but we are working a lot
with musical instruments,
with sound recordings,
digital storage media,
all of these different ways
of preserving our information,
and I think that focus,
too, on the original object,
as opposed to the
facsimile is something
that we will feel
incredibly strongly about.
That we couldn't
often pull out some
of the interesting information
we find with the new techniques,
if we hadn't preserved
the original.
So we've been working a lot,
thinking about a more integrated
and collaborative
approach to research.
Some of the instrument changes
that we've found have
been really interesting.
The instrument size
has been, I think,
one of the main things
Andrew and I were talking
about an atomic force
microscope,
which used to be the size
of, you know, my office.
And he came in a year or
so ago, and he's like,
I can buy a portable one.
And I said, a portable
AFM, right?
And you'll see it on the
table, it's like this thick,
and it was like, a little
bit much for my brain
to comprehend going
from a room size,
to this portable instrument.
But that has been
really amazing.
And then thinking about
the limits of detection,
we can detect so much more which
means we have to up our game
in in terms of understanding
what are we actually
seeing here?
What does it mean in terms
of the material changes
and the degradation?
Another interesting area has
been working with manufacturers
to try and sort of customize
or make sure we've got open
architecture instrumentation
and Lynn's done a lot of work
with us so that we can move away
from sampling as
much as possible,
and try to see how we can safely
analyze on the object itself.
And as you'll also see, the
portability has been a huge area
where we really felt we couldn't
justify spending hundreds
of thousands of dollars for
a desk, for a lab instrument,
lab-grade instrument,
when in fact we got 80%
of what we needed in
terms of the information
from a portable instrument that
could walk to the collections,
and makes conservators and
curators extremely happy
that they don't have
to walk down to the lab
with all of those materials.
So non-invasive, in terms
of not doing any interaction
with the collection,
has been a big push
for all of those instruments.
And you're going to see
many of them shortly.
And then thinking about
the techniques to sort
of assure these no-impact
on collection items.
Many of you in the audience
have seen changes over time,
as instruments were brought
in and then 10 years later,
we look at the damage
that we can now see
from that instrument.
So, we had a really huge
push to sort of look
at can we absolutely
make certain
that with a new technique,
or the way we're using
that instrument, that we're
not actually causing any harm
or any change to
the collection item?
So, as part of that
approach, particularly
over the last few
years, we really looked
at a more integrated, structured
way of making best use
of our time and resources,
and answering all
of the questions that come out.
We usually start with a baseline
imaging using the spectral
imaging system, to
sort of get a mapping
of what different
materials are in the object.
And from there, we do a range of
inorganic and organic analyses,
to sort of build up
that deep learning
at specific point
sources that we've mapped
out from the original object.
Using reference samples
has been a very large part
of that move towards
non-invasive, and being able
to expand our capabilities.
Because if we don't
have a reference known
of what we're working
with, then it's very hard
to tell us what that
actually is.
And so the reference
collection that I'll talk
about soon has been a big
part of working with that.
So the slide that
always has more words
than you can ever read is
just a quick overview of much
of what you're going to see.
So this spectral imaging,
and reflectance, transmitted,
raking, for courier
transform infrared,
to look at the organic
component,
the x-ray fluorescence,
to look at the inorganic,
the fiberoptic reflectance
spectrometer sort
of gives us more information
about dyes and pigments.
Raman spectroscopy.
So all of these different
techniques are being used
to complement each other,
and build up the picture
of what we need to know
about that particular object.
And it has also opened
up for us to,
rather than just push
towards a specific instrument,
really engage with
our colleagues
about what is the question and
how do we need to be extending
and expanding the utilization
of the instruments that we have,
or customizing in some way.
So we have what I
affectionately term--
and I still haven't come up with
a different term, the Go Team,
which is, what instruments
can we put on a cart
and wheel somewhere for those
instruments, and those people
to take those techniques.
And Megan and I came back
from Ireland a week ago?
Where we taught the
Spectral Imaging System,
and some of our colleagues
in PITD said
so you could either wheel it
across to the Jefferson Building
for the first time,
but you're taking it
to island for the first time?
Like to show its capabilities,
and we're like yeah!
And please talk to
Megan more about that,
it was a phenomenal experience.
And so coming back to
the Reference Collection,
we have an extensive
range of materials,
and we're building on this.
And this is to replicate what
we have in our collection,
but we can then do
destructive testing on.
So the Barrow Collection,
from the Barrow Labs,
which Kathlin mentioned, we have
those thousand boxes from 1500
to 1900, the best fun is
when you start, come in,
and I say you're allowed to
take a page out of this book,
and you're like really?
I can take a page out of
this book and destroy it?
So it's-- the interesting
crossover of still having
that physical reaction
to the collection item.
And Andrew will be talking
about some of the information
that we've looked at from
the Barrow Collection,
which goes back to
the original research,
and how we've been building
on doing those analyses,
again, over time.
We've a lot of 20th
Century, 21st Century books.
The reference papers
from various projects,
which are customized and we
have also been using it a lot
as a training research
experience for new staff
who want to be cross trained
in different instruments.
We have historic and modern
colorants, and pigments,
and Cindy has been
taking the lead on that.
If I'm ever somewhere
else overseas,
I usually get this
little email that's like,
do you think you could
drop into this place
and bring this one back?
And really interesting project
for with a number of PITD staff,
of looking at historic
recipes and recreating them.
The type of fibers, FRIL, the
Fiber Reference Imaging Library,
we've got an extensive range of
parchments, which we're starting
to work with parchment, because,
to bring in with
different treatments,
sound recordings
and storage media.
So these are all building
up our collection.
And as we build up those
reference materials,
we're now keeping the originals,
but also doing some re-testing
of naturally and
accelerated age.
So we can get that baseline
understanding information
about them.
Some of the reference materials
that we have, as you can see,
the Barrow Box, which
are individually boxed.
Magnetic tapes.
We even have a goat skin that
came from Israel, pigments,
damaged books, fibers,
you name it, it's there.
And so it was part of that,
and the big move towards trying
to make that information more
accessible and available,
which you also heard
from Kathlin is a
focus with the axis.
Class D, the Center for
Library Information--
uh, Linked Analytical
Scientific Samples-- Digital.
The Library is very
good at acronyms.
And this is all of the data
that we've collected about all
of our reference materials,
which is expanding into a way
of collecting data and
making it accessible,
about all of the analyses
we do on collection items.
And from this, we've also
worked very carefully
with the digital
formats, to make sure
that they are sustainable,
and then layered another level
on with Andrew Forsberg, of what
that visualization of this type
of information might
start to look at.
Why is this interesting?
Because if we just take an image
on this is high magnification
image of a piece of paper,
and with the scanning
electron microscope,
some of that information
is embedded in the image,
but it's not extractable.
So what do we do?
We want to extract from
the instrument itself all
of the metadata about how
the image was captured,
what the elements are,
how we can admit those,
and how we captured
that information.
So all of these different types
of information have been
collected to be made accessible
to our national and
international colleagues.
And we have been
working studiously
and Amanda has taken the
lead on working with some
of the re-working of
this database structure,
and so again, you can
see just the complexity
of the relationships between
the object-based focus,
and then as we start to add
in other types of analyses,
so we have a research
project, we have one--
five different samples,
12 different analyses,
then we age them, so you can
mention how just the bulk
of things expand immensely
as we move forward with that.
And I wanted to focus on
shared expertise, and thinking
about the internal and
external partnerships.
Our colleagues in Conservation,
you know, just phenomenal
to work with in terms of
that knowledge they have
as conservators, so that
we can work with them.
And without that strong
interaction, we wouldn't be able
to do a lot of the work that
we do, and so I just want
to thank you all with that,
and also for the curatorial
divisions, who now instead
of being afraid of what
is this scary instrument
that you might take to my
collection and do something to,
now feel comfortable about
saying "I have this kind
of weird question," and
that becomes a conversation,
and then an ongoing
collaborative, iterative process
of that shared knowledge,
because if we did the research
in isolation, it would not
actually have that richness,
and that depth of
knowledge, and expense.
And a lot we're doing
with local and national
and international colleagues.
Just a selection.
So with particularly
Washington D.C.,
we've been working a
lot more extensively
with National Archives.
With NIST, National Institute
of Standards in Technology,
the Smithsonian, the National
Gallery of Art, the University
of Delaware, the ongoing one
with Collections Demography
with the University
College London.
We've been working with
the Getty Institute,
some round-robin ones, a number
of those, but I just wanted
to give like a short selection
of the diverse range of,
from forensics to academics
to other national labs.
And in terms of research grants,
we've been really very excited
about the work that we've
been able to do with some
of these additional labs,
with National Center
for Preservation
Technology and Training,
where you've got some
early imaging support for,
as we built out the Spectral
Imaging Lab, National Endowment
for the Humanities,
as Jake mentioned,
the Glass at Risk Project.
IMLS, we worked with the
University of South Carolina,
looking at making a
tape degradation--
and I'll finish up by talking
about their current
Mellon Foundation grant.
Interns and fellowships has
been an amazing way for us
to expand what we can do.
When sometimes, over the years,
when staff sizes have reduced
and expanded, I mean, the
size of the number of staff,
not the staff sizes [laughs],
that did not come out well,
so junior fellows, as well,
and we're always delighted
to be able to participate in,
and then the preservation
science internship,
which is an unpaid fellowship,
but we're getting a lot
of people from local
universities
as Kathlin mentioned, the
CLIR-Mellon Fellowship
for Dissertation, Research
and Original Sources,
and we've also been
delighted to have a post-doc,
in data curation
through CLIR-Mellon.
G.W. Forensic Science
Master's Program.
They often come and do their
research projects with us.
The SEED Program,
which is looking
at under-privileged
high school students,
it's just so exciting
and rewarding.
HACU, there's so many
different programs
that we enjoy working with,
and I do want to, again,
take my hat off to my staff
who, we pretty much learned
that do not anticipate
getting much of anything done
over summer, because
working with the students,
which is incredibly rewarding,
but does take a lot
of time and effort.
So that's another good
support from our Directors,
has been a phenomenal way for
us to sort of look at diversity
and expand what we actually do
with training possibilities
and reaching out.
And I struggled with this slide,
because as I started looking
back through all of the tops
in the symposia that we had
done, I got a little bit tired,
but just a couple of examples
of some of the bigger ones,
and then, you know, we've done
everything from Iron Gall Ink
to musical instruments,
to Terahertz, to UNESCO,
it is amazing what we
have actually worked
on with colleagues, and
also training workshops.
We've started building up that.
Working with ensuring a
knowledge for people in a range
of different areas, through
chemometrics, rare book school,
imaging science and technology,
so expanding that scope
of how we can share
our knowledge and work
with different groups
and audiences.
The data science
and visualization has been
a really exciting area,
where we started thinking more,
you saw when I was talking
about the new approach,
where we do,
we start with the
spectral imaging,
and then we do the
deep dive down.
So how do we start to bring all
of this work together in a way
that actually allows us to
engage with the information
and make it available
to other people.
And so I wanted to--
where does this come from?
So we are talking, and this
is a block book from 1470,
we are talking to a
curator who is like, well,
I want to see how it's made
in terms of how it's printed,
and then what is that?
So we do the XL riff, and
it comes up as copper,
so we are like, well it could
be verdigris or malachite,
so with the FORS, now we can see
that it's actually verdigris,
not malachite, and then
we're asked, well is it,
what's the sizing, so we
combat with the gelatin sizing,
so all of those-- how
do we start to think
about a more exciting way
rather than having to read
like a 20-page report which
you know is going to send you
to sleep by page 5, even
though you're interested
in all of the graphs.
And how can we actually
do that more functionally?
So we started working with
the International Image
Interoperability Framework.
Triple-I, F, and the
Mirador Viewer, and thinking
about how people
currently engage with that.
So one of the exciting ones,
which I will direct you
to ask Megan and Chris about,
since they did all the work
on this, which is a letter
from Alexander Hamilton.
And using this platform,
we can now start to put all
of the information about
it, show how we've worked
with extracting the text from
under a redacted component,
and bring out what the original
transcription from that was.
And I will let you ask
Megan or Chris why they--
the son redacted this
from his parents' letters.
And one of the interesting
things going
on further was then how
do we start to engage
and input both curatorial,
and bring together
curatorial and scientific data?
Because we get so impatient
and excited about what we do,
we want other people to see
that, and engage with it.
So using this platform, we can
now start to, for this one,
bring in the information about
the analyses we're doing,
work with a curator
to add in annotations
about curatorial information and
that, and then start to think
about how we can layer
in the scientific data.
So now we have a way of
sort of adding in all
of the different
spectral imaging data
that you can click
through and look at.
Some of the processing.
Because I'm lazy, I
had Andrew do a slider,
so you can just click
through that more easily
and engage with it.
You can zoom in from
the platform.
So a much more effective
way to engage with the type
of information that we're
putting there, and putting it
out into the digital realm.
And then when we start to
look at scientific analyses,
we can zoom in on that, and for
the geeky scientist, of course,
who wants to see all of
the different graphs,
we can now link through
those as well.
We edited and started thinking
about what we wanted to do
in terms of high-level metadata,
and how this could be more
exciting for curators,
who might not be excited about
all the scientific graphs
that we are excited about.
So if you hover over,
for example, verdigris,
because if they didn't
know what it was,
you could get this simple, this
is a carbon-containing pigment,
or we can actually use
True Link to open data,
and link to the Wiki
data or the Giddy site,
to actually link those
different websites together.
So these are things
we've been doing,
even into the scientific
data, where for reflectance,
we didn't want to redo all of
this, you can click on there,
and you get to the
IUPAC gold Books,
which is the original
chemical terms.
So these are ways of sort
of starting to pull all
of that information together.
I wanted to wrap up with
the current project we had
with the Mellon grant, which is
assessing the physical condition
of the national collection.
Because it starts to
bring together a lot
of these initiatives and
approaches that you're seeing.
So this was a grant for
$540,000 for 40 months,
about three years,
and allowed us
to bring two additional staff
members, well, people into PITD,
Andrew Forsberg,
and Robin Hodgkins,
as the researchers
on that project.
And this is to really
start to look at and think
about what's coming back
in a wonderful full circle
to Kathlin's comments
about brittleness.
How do we know what
the current state
of the National Collection is?
And how can we use our
facilities and our knowledge
to work with people
to understand
that more effectively?
So we have five partners,
and five different regions
of America, and they're allowing
us to take a 10 millimeter strip
of one general collection book,
and we can analyze the same 500
volumes from all the partners,
to see how alike or
not alike they are.
And we wanted to really think
about, can we get information
about the environment and usage,
in terms of what we're seeing
with the differences
between these materials?
And we're just starting to
look to see what, of course,
as you know, many
institutions don't have a lot
of easily accessible
environmental
and circulation data, but
we're trying to fold that,
and where we're at, and
please see Andrew and Robin,
I just want to sort of give a
bit of a background about this.
So over the last five or six
years, we've really looked
at how do we miniaturize
test methods?
So from Cindy, can we
do like a micro-pH,
rather than taking
two and a half pages?
Taking that down to three
hole punches, to Andrew,
when he first arrived.
And I was like, so how
small can we get a sample
for size exclusion
chromatography to look
at the molecular weight.
And we've really minimized
the size of samples from all
of these, so that we could,
from this 10 millimeter strip,
do size exclusion
chromatography,
to look at the molecular weight.
Mini tensile testing,
mini acidity--
looking at the ultraviolet
UV/VIS and infrared.
Additional tests we wanted to
do was the dear old double-fold,
and I'm going to leave that
for people at the tables
to talk about, because I'm sure
there will be some wonderfully
animated discussion, and then
thinking about other things,
like the spot test,
how subjective
or objective could they be?
How can we start
to correlate those?
And Callie and Eric
will talk to you
about what we affectionately
call box sniffing.
And how can we start to go from
this now-huge volume of data
that we're getting from all of
these different methodologies,
to create a reproducible,
useful test that people can use,
in the stacks, that really
does give them a good feeling
about what the condition
of the collections are.
And so what we're
working on this,
and if anyone is interested,
please let us know,
because we'd be happy
to send out papers
to have people try
the test method
to see is it useful,
is it horrible?
Did you like it?
Did you not?
But it has got to
be inexpensive.
It needs to be quick, it
needs to be effective,
and these are the
things we're looking at,
as well as the objectivity.
What does identical look like?
So one thing we started doing
was taking pictures of the--
each shipment that came in
of the same 80 to 100 books.
Because the next five slides
are the same books, top left,
across, from each institution,
and I think you'll quickly see
that they don't bear a lot
of resemblance to each other.
I mean, these are
actually the same books.
Then, to make life
very interesting,
we see up to four different
types of paper in one book.
Identical is not very identical.
This is one book, top to bottom,
with different types
of paper in it.
So what we're really
trying to look at now,
is what is the impact of
that different paper type
on the qualities of that,
because I'm sure at the time
when they printed it, it
looked exactly the same color,
and responded, they
thought it was the same.
And some of the really
interesting information in terms
of how people are dealing
with this, and coming back
to that stack test is thinking
about people will do the visual
assessment of what they do,
and so what we've gone through
is visually how do people think
about this information and look
at the assessment of the binding
and the text block itself?
We're focusing mainly
on the textbook.
And then as we start to look
at this a little bit more,
thinking about the text block,
what are the four categories
that make the most sense
in terms of damage?
So going from actual physical
damage, like broken corners
of the actual paper itself, to
things that could be structural,
like text box separation.
The visual-- which is always
very subjective, and then things
that happen to the volume
that may have happened
after the case, not
necessarily part
of the inherent properties
of the paper.
Now, as Andrew has so amazingly
done, we can now extract
out those specific key
components that relate
to the visual assessment,
and then start to look
at what is the pH, what
is the tensile testing?
What are the spot tests?
What are all the
different infrared
and fiberoptic reflectance
spectroscopy analyses,
and then one I really love,
the Chromatesting diagram,
so you can see if
it's going yellow,
which direction the
color is going in.
So this is all now part of
this huge volume of work
that we're working on, that
really starts to inform us
to know more about where we're
at with the collection
information.
So I want to finish
by thanking everyone,
and I'll invite Kathlin and
Jake back up to the podium
if you have questions, but I
really wanted to spend most
of the time for you to
engage with the staff,
and see their phenomenal work
and what they've been doing.
So thank you so much
for listening.
[ Applause ]
>> Do we have any questions?
I know, it's post-lunch on
a day after the holidays.
>> Thank you for
very fascinating,
very cutting edge [inaudible].
Just a couple of
basic questions.
Is there [inaudible]--
[ Inaudible Question ]
>> Yes, Preservation, Research
and Testing Division is
within the Preservation
Directorate,
and there's four Divisions.
There's Preservation,
Research and Testing,
the Conservation Division, we
work with Special Collections,
and then some of my
colleagues are here, Binding
and Collections, Kia, and
Preservation Reformatting.
So those four divisions make
the Preservation Directorate.
And Jake is the Director of the
whole Preservation Directorate.
So, without further adieu, I
will let my staff scurry back
to their tables, and
open up for questions.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]