>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]   >> Hello, everyone.

It's now 2:00 o'clock and we're ready for our next set
of presentations, and this time we're going to be hearing
about personal documents and books.
And as before, we're fortunate to have a number of experts here
at the Library who are going to share their expertise with us on how
to care for these items that you may have in your personal collection.
And we also are going to be talking
about something a little bit different.
Documents and books, of course, are fairly well known.
We're also going to have some experts who are going to be talking
about websites and social media, which is something a little bit new.
So talking about personal documents, we have Annlinn Kruger.
Lynn Kidder is going to be talking about books, and Abby Grotke
and Gina Jones are going to be talking
about archiving websites and social media.
So, Annlinn.
>> Annlinn Kruger: I would like to take a few moments
to discuss the preservation of personal documents.
My focus will be on paper documents,
but I will also mention keeping digital documents.
For the preservation of paper documents, I would like you
to understand the characteristics of paper, sources of potential damage,
and the benefits of careful storage and handling.
For keeping digital documents, I would like you
to appreciate the importance of identifying
of where your documents are stored, which documents have value,
and how you manage your files.
The Library's collections include national treasures,
such as Thomas Jefferson's rough draft of the Declaration
of Independence and Houston Hartsfield Holloway's autobiography
of his life as a slave and then as a free man.
All paper-based objects are essentially ephemeral.
Each decays according to its chemical characteristics,
mechanics of its composition, and the impact of environmental factors.
To understand how to care about paper sheets,
we need to understand something about paper chemistry.
Much of the deterioration
of wood-based paper is caused by acid degradation.
Acids form in the papers themselves and the process
of acid formation can be accelerated by environmental factors
such as exposure to light, moisture, heat, and gases in the air.
We note this as discoloration and brittleness.
The characteristics of paper are also a result
of manufacturing processes.
Throughout the history of papermaking,
additives have been used to facilitate the application of media,
such as inks and paints, and these affect the wear of the papers.
It is not only the constituents of the paper itself
that determine the characteristic forms of damage,
here we can see the effects of acid iron gall ink, which destroys paper;
metal clips, which crease paper and deposit rust; insects,
which eat paper and deposit organic matter; moisture,
which causes distortion and which promotes mold which discolors
and digests paper; pressure sensitive adhesive tape,
which can permanently bond to paper fibers;
and contact with unstable materials,
which cause discoloration and degradation.
Common sense caretaking reduces damage and destruction.
Preventive conservation continues a long practice
of caring for materials.
Conservator Heather Wanser researched an image of a fly
on the Waldseemuller map and came across a practice of using images
of potential sources of damage to ward them off.
This is the only known copy of the map,
but we attribute its preservation to luck
and favorable environmental conditions.
We can control macroenvironments
and provide protective microenvironments.
As soon as we enter the proximity of an object,
we become environmental factors.
Our breath changes the relative humidity
of the air, and our bodies add heat.
The light we need to see by increases exposure to radiation.
We create and stir up dust.
But materials are collected for use and our job is
to take care of them carefully.
Paper documents can be placed in folders or mats, which can be boxed
and kept on shelves in cool, dark rooms with good air circulation.
Matted documents can be displayed in frames
with ultraviolet filtering components,
but low light levels are still necessary.
Copies can also be displayed.
Paper should be kept in stable environments with temperatures
of about 70 degrees Fahrenheit and relative humidity of around 35
to 50 percent; above that can encourage mold growth.
Avoid storing items where risk levels for damage are greater;
that is, any space with high levels of light, moisture, and heat.
This would be the attics and basements that people are
so fond of storing things in.   The characteristics of paper

and human imagination have led to a wide range of uses.
How paper is handled influences its condition.
You will help shape the history of the objects you care for.
Some choices might,
from a preservation perspective, be frowned upon.
Although we live in the digital age, we live in a world of paper.
You come to your tasks prepared with a wealth
of experience in handling paper.   You know how paper looks and feels.

It is not always possible to predict how paper will respond to handling,
and you already know to proceed with caution.
Safe handling is a matter
of consciously describing what you do successfully many times a day:
paying attention to details and understanding implications.
Preparing your workspace is ever primary importance;
even a small space can be kept clean and well organized.
In these images, our colleague, Jenn [inaudible],
is rehousing the President Theodore Roosevelt papers.
She has provided a clean surface, is limiting the number of sheets
on the work surface, and is keeping the pages
in order to reduce handling.
You can see the care with which Jenn is lifting and moving the sheets,
particularly the limited degree of flexing.
You don't want to find
out how brittle your paper is during flexing.
And you can see the results of her efforts.
The box is full and folders are all upright with no slumping,
but it is not stuffed, and folders can be removed and replaced safely.
Here, conservator Alan Haley is demonstrating the use of a support.
Alan is carefully using both hands and is limiting flexing.
If paper is too brittle to sustain any flexing,
then a rigid support is necessary.
Please note that none of us are wearing gloves,
although cotton gloves are often recommended, and particularly
for photographs where they might very well be necessary all the time.
On paper documents with rough edges, they can catch
and cause further tearing and breaking of brittle edges.
For handling paper sheets, very clean hands are often best.
The basic components
of good handling are common sense and adequate time.
Gravity and the other physical forces,
which inform our every day experiences, are always at work.
If a handling strategy seems insecure,
then it probably isn't adequate.
Time saved by questionable shortcuts is time taken
from the useful existence of materials.
To reverse what I said before, although we live in a world
of paper, we live in a digital age.
Many of our personal records are digital.
The files you have on your computer are often just as important to you
as the paper-based documents in your personal collection.
These files can include resumes, research papers,
financial spreadsheets, tax forms, presentations, and more.
You might also have digital copies of original letters, maps,
or family histories that you've scanned.
You probably can't keep everything,
so decide which files are of enduring value.
Organize important files by giving them good, descriptive file names.
Make sure you can find the files by organizing their home
on the computer, also known as the directory or file structure.
To manage important files over the long term, store two copies
in separate locations lest an accident
or computer failure damage one set of files.
Check your files once a year to assure that they can be opened
and read, and don't forget to migrate or transfer your older files
as you upgrade or change software.
If today's letters are e-mails, and today's scrapbooks are on Facebook,
then both of these electronic sources document important events,
transactions, and relationships in your life.
Saving an e-mail or saving a Facebook page
or other website involves keeping it separate
from your e-mail program or social media website.
This is because e-mail programs and social media platforms aren't meant
to keep information for a long time.
Start the archiving process by figuring out what you have,
determine which information has long-term value,
export the selected messages or websites and organize these files
in a way that's meaningful to you.
Finally, and just as with your other digital documents,
manage these files by making multiple copies,
storing these copies in safe locations, checking your files
for readability, and migrating files as you upgrade or change software.
Whatever the format of your documents, and your thoughts
about time, materials, and memory, decisions about selection,
organization, use, and storage will affect the accessibility
of collections.
Thank you for your attention, and I'd like to thank my colleague,
Holly Robertson, for all the text relating to the digital world.
Thank you.   [Applause]

>> Lynn Kidder: I'm Lynn Kidder.
I'm a book conservator here at the Library,
and I work in the Conservation Office,
and I'm going to talk to you about books.
I don't know that there's a whole lot that I have to say
that Ann didn't just say, but repetition is always a good teacher.

We have -- let me see, okay.
There are many occasions when staff in my office ends up teaching people
about the care and handling of books, not just to the public,
but anybody who is a new employee at the Library is supposed
to get an orientation as to how to handle the materials.
And it is, actually, in the library situation, a case of learning
about the stewardship of a collection in general,
but this also applies to your own things, of course.
As you've heard, there are various forces that contribute
to the degradation of library materials,
which are primarily organic.
Cellulose, that sort of thing, paper being made primarily of cellulose.
So on the molecular level, things are subjected
to various chemical forces.
And then on the physical object level, there are all kinds of things
like the sort of handling that can contribute


So moisture, temperature fluctuation, these are things
that can affect paper, and we've talked a lot
about this today to people.
I'm hoping that those of you who haven't heard
about it before become aware of the importance
of the relative humidity of the air.   And the temperature in Washington,

D.C. during the summertime is really not a very good time
to have anything stored in a dark place like your basement,
because mold spores are all around us and they really are just looking
for an opportunity to start growing in some sort
of nice, dark, moist place.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of pollution in our air,
even if it's indoors, and chemicals that are found
in auto exhaust have a lot to do with breaking down paper.
And poor storage conditions -- the Library is lucky in many ways --
the institution has got very good storage in many, many situations.
The older a building is, the harder it is for things to be stored in it,
including your home, it's the same sort of situation.
And it's expensive to have good storage, especially to make it
out of an older, to add it on in some way to an older structure.
I could just hit enter, right?
It's -- in the case of books, one of the things most people do just
without thinking is to grab a book from the top by the end cap,
which is one of the weaker parts of a binding.
And eventually you'll find that the spine might come off,
or at least there might be some loss at the head of the book.
That's what you see happening here.   Nobody's mentioned money just yet.

It is a big part of what we do.
Replacing materials, some materials are replaceable.
Many things in the Library, because of their age and rarity,
are not replaceable, but there's never enough money to go around
and take care of all the analog and digital materials that we have now.

So you've just heard these principles, and here they are again.
I think clean hands is not such a difficult thing to think of,
but it makes a difference.
Paper can pick up oils from your fingers, and dirt is attracted
to the oil and it can cause stains.
Eating and drinking around materials is not a good idea.
We're not allowed to in the Library, but, you know,
at home you could do what you want.   I'll show some supports,

some of which are a good thing to think about.
And when you're storing your own materials,
we've heard some things about bookshelves today.
I think the material that bookshelves are made from is not --
I mean, there's not much you can do about it in a lot of cases,
but you can use bookends.
And storage practices, the environment we've talked about,
but using archival storage materials is something I've talked
to people quite a bit about today, and it's reasonably easy
to have access to some
of the archival housing materials that are available now.
Okay. It's true about the workspace size.
If you can, depending on what you're doing, it's just easier
to keep things in order if you have a reasonable work size
space arranged.
In the library reading rooms, there are going
to be signs usually keeping certainly items off
of the library tables, and pencils are the only writing instruments you
really ought to use around paper-based materials,
because it can be removed fairly easily and ink stains cannot.

And there's that white glove thing, which people ask fairly frequently,
and well, when you're handling photographs is the time
when we recommend them in the Conservation Office.
Ann mentioned about how they can cause your hands to be sort
of clumsy and you can tag and rip things.
They also get dirty, and once they're dirty,
they're not doing much good at keeping the object clean.
This person has got them on because she has a photograph
on the other side of this board, and part of the business of housing
and the proper storage and handling is based on support
as a general idea, supporting the material
so that the forces of gravity are lessened.
And the most vulnerable part of a binding is called the joint.
It's where the board meets the text block.
In bindings that were made centuries ago,
there was a more sturdy attachment between the board and the text.
Since the middle of the 19th century when case bindings were begun
to be used regularly, there's a --
it's a weaker part of the binding now because it's simply glued.
Paper is glued over the joint.
So you'll find that's why the boards come off.
And supporting the boards when you've got a book open
or on the table, it helps keep some of the stress off of the joint.
This is kind of a fancy support that we have some of here in the Library,
both for showing things to readers or having --
given to a reader as a support for an item they're looking at.
And it's an item you could -- well, we make some of them ourselves.
You could use some things, similar things at home if you needed
to have a support system.
This system is a series of pieces that you can arrange
in different ways which is useful when trying
to support something that's --
a book that has kind of an unusual shape.
>> Does it matter what the supports are made of?
Styrofoam or --   >> Lynn Kidder: Styrofoam, no.

Something that's going to be used over a period of time that's going
to be in contact with a book or paper material needs to be something
that is not, that is chemically neutral, inactive,
and not going to be deteriorating in some way
that it can affect the book itself.
Having said that, I mean, if you're going to --
well, the supports that are used at the Library are
of cartable quality materials for that reason.

Does that -- [inaudible] Well, that's a good question.
If you had Styrofoam around the house --
I hope I don't get in trouble for this, because it comes inside
of so many things, you could cover it, I suppose.
Nah, I can't go there, because you're not going
to have the right thing to cover it with, either.
You're not going to have a need for this sort of support, most likely.
I have to admit, this is my all-purpose talk here that speaks
to librarians and library people, too,
which is where you would find this bad shelving, of course.
Nobody at home is going to put their books
on the shelf the way the ones are on the bottom.
Or here, or at - but there is, if you are interested,
a way of carefully taking a book off the shelf, which is basically rather
than grabbing it by the head, the end cap is to press the books,
the volumes on either side of the book you're interested in.
Press them slightly in if there's space and grab the book by its spine
and once you've removed it, then you want to readjust the books that are
on the shelf so that they are supported.

And that's what's going on in this slide.
There is also, the size
of the bookend is a good size for supporting.
If this heavy stack of books had a smaller bookend,
it might just be leaning over, like I'm sure you've seen.
This fancy shelving is something they have
in Geography and Map Division.
You're not going to have this at home, necessarily,
but it is perfectly fine to store a very large book flat.
As a matter of fact, if you've got a large,
thick book that has a weak binding,
you're probably better off storing it flat like that,
like this, instead of on its end.
A family Bible or something with those very heavy boards,


And if -- well, you're not going to be in the stacks
in Princeton photographs, either, but it is oftentimes,
when you have something large, it is useful to have someone help you,
and the attic in the basement of your home again.
It's the extremes of temperature, the fluctuation of temperature,
and extreme heat in the attic is going to break down paper,
cellulose, which is what paper is made from,
and the basement business is because of mold growth.
And once you've got mold growth going
on in a paper object, it becomes a problem.
You have just have to keep control of archival housing.
You can -- there are so many different forms
in which these housings are available,
there's really no excuse not to have them.
And they are even made for objects should happen to have textile things
at home or other types of things, but mostly we talk to people
about having file folders that are archival with other folders
on the inside of them and putting them into document boxes or boxes
like the ones, the three that are in the smaller picture.
They're books or, one of those, I think, is a CD storage sized box,
because you've got CDs, too, I know.
There are -- if you've got a piece of paper, a note, an old bookmark,
whatever, that's been sitting inside of a book for a long time,
if it's not made of a good quality paper,
I'm sure you've all seen the sort of staining at some point.
And if you had to put something in a book,
which happens at the library frequently,
pH neutral paper can be used, and it should not stain or degrade
over time at quite the same rate.
So if you have to put a lot of papers in a book for some reason,
you can sort of stagger them through the text and not shove them all
down into the gutter, because that's another vulnerable area
of the binding.
And you've heard about paperclips, which will stain and rust,
and it's easy to rip the page, also.
There are some handy ways of getting them off of there by bending them.
Photocopying and scanning.
One of the major problems at the Library is books that have been sent
to a bindery and they're -- they've either been oversewn or chopped back
and so they don't open as well as they might have originally,
and it's a challenge for scanning.
It's also a challenge should a reader want to photocopy,
and readers are not always allowed to photocopy materials.
We don't have edge copiers.
At one point, the library was interested, but you can see
in this picture down on the bottom, that if a paper is brittle
and force is applied on the bed of a scanning machine or a Xerox machine,
there can be some consequences.
I want to thank you all for listening to this little spiel,
and if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
I'm going to be here the next half hour,
and thank you for your attention.   [Applause]

>> Abby Grotke: Hello, my name is any got
and this is my colleague, Gina Jones.
We're on the Web Archiving Team here at the Library of Congress,
and we're in the awkward position of talking
about something very personal in terms of your web content,
because we archive on such a very large scale here at the Library.
We have archived over 167, probably 170 by now,
terabytes of web content, mostly related to elections
and other themes and events that are of interest
to our library's curator.   So we don't typically talk to people

about archiving personal web content, but as a person
who has a website, it's of interest to me.
So we're going to expand a little bit
about on what our colleagues have told you a little bit about already.
You know, the big ones, which have been covered already today,
which is identify what you have online and where.
You may have a blog, you may have other content
on other various hosted sites.
You may have commented on another person's blog.
Do you care about saving that kind of content?
You may. You really have to decide what it is you might want to save
that is your digital life online.
And some of that might be on your computer at home already,
so there's just extra content online, but there may be others.
And I pulled a few examples of my own personal content.
Again, websites, blogs, Facebook content --
you've heard a little bit about that today.
Twitter feeds, if you're a musician you may have content still
on My Space -- some people still do that.
Oh, this doesn't work.   That's unfortunate.

Sorry, I added a couple of slides from over on the computer there
that digitally, they didn't transfer over here.
That's interesting.
I had a couple of screen shots of the Internet Archive,
and you may be familiar --
is everybody aware of what the Internet Archive is or --
they have been archiving the Web since 1996.
And a lot of people assume that just means they've got it all,
they have the entire Web.   Well that's not necessarily true.

They have a lot, but they don't have everything.
So if you go to archive.org and do a search on your personal website,
it may have been archived, and that's a great thing.
But they don't allow a way to actually get your personal content
out of there, so it's not a reliable backup system, so we just wanted
to mention the Internet Archive.
A few tips for preserving your own digital content.
Really, it's all about exporting, downloading,
getting it out of whatever service it's on out there on the Web
and making copies locally.
And we have, we've pulled out a couple of tips,
and he have a handout back at our table there of some other tools
that are available, and Gina is going to talk about the tools.
I won't go into the copies and storage, I'll swear.
I think our colleagues have covered that enough.
>> Gina Jones: And as Abby mentioned,
this organize is probably one of the critical pieces.
As mentioned earlier, you can save as a web page and get content down,
but unless you have a really --
a strategy how you do this day after day of archiving the web page,
perhaps, you'll soon lose track of the content that you downloaded.
Because when you download a web page, it's not just one file,
it's the file, HTML file, and all the associated images stuck
in a folder, so you really need a strategy
to organize this material if you do the save as.
In the time that social networking has proliferated, surprise,
we've had a proliferation of tools to help you back up
and save personal archived data.
This thing here, Backupify, actually allows you to provide back
up to many kinds of different kinds of content,
but I'm just going to go through this.
In the original day of the Web, we had websites,
and HTTrack has been around a long time.
I've been using it about 10 years now, and what you have to think
about is how you're going to also access your data.
And when you do bring it down locally, if you do a file save
as a web page, you really can't navigate between the content.
It really is a single object and you're viewing it,
and if you have a lot of content, you want to think
about how do you want to store it.
One nice thing about HTTrack, if you do have a website
that you have a password, you can come in here
and actually access password protected sites
and download your copy.   It does take little bit

of understanding how a website copier works and what [inaudible]
and a few other things about web pages in order
to be successful at this, so.
If you feel like a challenge, HTTrack is good.
It's not that hard to use, but it does take a little bit
of understanding about websites.
And some of these others, it's very interesting.
They afford you opportunities to export your social media content
in multiple different formats.
You can use a browser and save as a web page; you can save as a PDF.
There are some software programs here that will allow you
to actually record it as a video file and make content,
make comments on it in an audio and save it as an AVI.
You can also -- we don't have it on this, but there's a place
that will allow you to save your, right now, just blogspot as a book.
So you plug it in and it'll create a book of your blogspot comments.
Some of this is free; some of it's not free.
That fabric book isn't free.
This, of course, Firefox has got some great plug-ins that'll help you
archive your data, this has for Facebook.
And Twapper Keeper is pretty good.
You can export, and actually, we've used it to export some tweets
that we needed to have on site.   >> Before we got the --

>> Gina Jones: And of course, there's a lot -- BackupMyTweets.
And of course, Google has got a copy of all the tweets you can get
and then, they've paid for a copy and you can get it from Google.
You Tube Downloader, hopefully you've kept a copy
of your You Tube file before you've uploaded it, but if you lost it,
you can come back to You Tube and get it.
And again, this creates images from Flicker.
Hopefully you have your images, and I think for the most part,
when you do post images in video, they do change the format.
You Tube makes it into a Flash file, and most of these Photoshop,
photo places online will downsize the quality of your image,
so that not an archival strategy to bring it back down online
if you're going to try and print it out.
It just -- you'll be very disappointed.
And lots of different ways and strategies to go ahead
and archive your content from the web.
If you care about it, you should do it, because if you lose it
from your desktop, and I think as time goes along, people are going
to -- obviously, people are finding this important,
because I did a search, probably last year,
and I didn't find the quantity of social networking programs
to allow you to save your content, so, anyway.
Any questions for us?   Thanks. [Applause]

>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.