>> Hello everyone.
I'm Colleena Black and welcome
to today's episode
of Online Office Hours from
the Library of Congress.
Today we are going to be exploring preservation
research and testing at the Library of Congress
and we're really glad that
you can be here with us today.
This event will be recorded and any questions
or other participant contributions
may be made publicly available
as part of the library's archive.
Like I said, we're really glad
that you can join us today,
whether you're here with
us live or via recording.
These office hours are short and informal.
We're going to get started with a 20 minute
presentation and then we're going to follow
that up with Q&A and conversation.
So anything that the presentation prompts,
please do feel free to share
that in the chat box.
You'll be able to talk with each other
and our presenters via chat, so
let's get started using that.
Please, you know, tell us your name,
where you're joining us from,
and what and who you teach.
That would be helpful just
to know who is here with us.
I hope you all can hear me okay.
As I said, today's episode is focused
on preservation research and testing.
And we are joined by Andrew Davis,
Megan Wilson, and Finella France
from the Preservation Research and Testing
Division of the Library of Congress.
And if you have questions
or comments at any point,
please feel free to post them in the chat box.
We'll also be posting links as Andrew
and Megan and Finella are speaking.
And we can also answer questions that come
up or pose them to our presenters during Q&A.
So now I'm happy to pass
things over to our presenters.
>> Hi everyone.
My name is Andrew Davis.
Hopefully you can hear me.
Let me know if you can't.
And so we are here today to tell you a
little bit about the Preservation Research
and Testing Division in the library.
As Colleena mentioned, when I
say "we" there are three of us.
So I don't know if we just want to introduce
ourselves very briefly just to say hello,
make sure all of our audio can
be heard coming in and out.
We'll kind of trade off in the middle.
So, I'm going to let Dr. Finella
France introduce herself first.
>> Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Finella France, Chief of
Preservation Research and Testing Division.
And very privileged to have a
staff of 18 amazing scientists
and preservation science specialists working in
the labs that you can see on the screen there.
Wet chemistry, dry chemistry, non-invasive
techniques, portable instruments,
and you'll hear some of this as we go forward.
Thanks, Andrew.
>> Megan?
>> My name is Megan Wilson.
I work primarily in the optical
properties laboratory of PRTD.
I have a background in fine arts and art
history and I made my way to the library
from an internship that started at
the Walters Museum in Baltimore.
I've been here about 10 years now.
>> Great. And I am Dr. Andrew Davis.
I am a chemist in PRTD.
I have my background and PhD in
polymer science and engineering.
Tend to work a little bit in both labs,
the ones that I'm showing you here.
And I'll tell you about those in a minute.
And then I think I'll give a quick intro
and then we'll hand it off to Megan.
So these are our labs.
We do have some lab spaces where we do
measurements throughout the buildings.
And these buildings are on Capitol
Hill in D.C. But these two are kind
of our primary lab spaces
where we do most of our work.
The image on the top is our wet lab, looks a
lot like a traditional chemistry lab with lots
of bubbling beakers and things like that.
We mostly do destructive testing
in that lab, so it's really limited
to test samples and reference samples.
The image on the bottom is
our optical properties lab,
mostly filled with microscopes
and cameras and spectrometers.
It's a non-invasive lab and most of the
instruments down there are non-contact.
And so when we want to measure or analyze
objects within the library's collection,
they'll often go to that lab in the lower image.
Very rarely, if ever, will
they see the upstairs lab.
And what we do in those labs is
we do kind of very traditional,
analytical science testing and measurement.
PRTD falls under the broader umbrella of
the preservation directory whose mission is
to ensure the long-term access and
preservation of the library's collections.
PRTD serves as kind of the scientific
cornerstone of those efforts.
And we tend to think of our
research in three categories.
They span analytical requests, something
as simple as a curator coming to us
and asking what an ink or
a stain on an object is.
We can analyze it and figure that out.
We do quality assurance testing.
A lot of that happens in that kind of
upstairs lab with the bubbling beakers.
Anything that could eventually come in
contact with objects in the library,
whether those are housing materials,
whether those are adhesives for floor tiles
in new spaces, we'll test those to make sure
we understand what's going into the library.
And then we have longer term research projects.
Something more like academic
style scientific research.
And I think we'll touch on
a couple of those today.
And so I'm going to turn it over to Megan
to tell you a little bit
about multispectral imaging.
>> Thanks.
So one of the first techniques that we use in
our analytical studies is multispectral imaging.
Multispectral is a form of digital
photography that captures images
under illumination beyond
just the visible light range.
So while our eyes can't see in ultraviolet
or infrared, the camera can pick up a lot
of useful information in these regions.
Next slide please.
So here you can see our equipment in action.
We use a 50 Megapixel monochrome camera.
Imaging in black and white allows us to achieve
a better signal to noise ratio in our images.
So we see more of what we want
and less of what we don't want.
A color camera has an RGB filter in front of the
sensor and while it's still usable for this kind
of imaging, it's still one
additional layer of interference.
Our custom made light panels, you can see here,
are equipped with narrow band LED illumination
in 27 different wavebands that span
from 365 nanometers in the ultraviolet
through the visible spectrum and
to 940 nanometers in the infrared.
We use LED specifically not only for their
longevity, but because they have a low light
and low heat output, which
is safer for our objects.
Next slide please.
So even though our camera
captures in black and white,
we include this standardized color
checker in every shot that we take.
Our capture software knows the values of each
of these color patches and uses an algorithm
to derive what we call a full spectrum
color image of everything that we capture
because we're able to use data from nine visible
wavebands as opposed to a regular color camera
which only uses three, R, G,
and B. Next slide, please.
So on the right you can see the resulting images
that we get from a standard capture sequence.
You can notice how the different inks and
pigments react differently under the wavebands.
And it's these unique responses of the materials
that we use to answer our analytical questions.
Next slide.
One of our most treasured documents at the
library is Thomas Jefferson's handwritten draft
of the Declaration of Independence.
Can you click for me, please?
So in the detail, you can see
that he has very neat handwriting.
And even when he makes annotations,
they're quite tidy.
He crosses it out and writes
the change neatly above.
He even annotates in the margin of the document
who made the change if it wasn't himself,
noting contributions from Franklin and Adams.
Click please.
This particular area right here, you
can see that the word is smudged.
And this means of correction doesn't
happen anywhere else in the document.
Next slide.
Upon further investigation, we used
multispectral imaging to separate the ink
of the overtext from that of
the original writing below.
Next slide.
As you can see, Jefferson originally
wrote "our fellow subjects."
Realizing the implication of that
specific word in a time of political unrest
when our country had just fought a war
over seceding from the English monarchy,
he made the change to citizens to
ensure the gravity of that word,
that we were a free and independent society.
So we made some inquiries once we found this
out and a researcher at Princeton was going
through Jefferson's journals
in which he noted his mistake
and that he wanted to "expunge
it from existence."
So this really captures a pointed
moment in Jefferson's thought process.
The ink hadn't even dried before he made the
conscious change to "citizens" from "subjects."
Next slide, please.
We took a similar approach when we imaged
this page of a letter from Alexander Hamilton
to his then fiancé that he wrote in 1780.
The heavy redactions render that
paragraph completely illegible,
but by separating the two inks and
visibly suppressing the crossout,
the original content becomes readable.
Next slide, please.
So it turns out that this letter, whose
contents are largely about a battle
of the Revolutionary War, contains 14 lines
of this sweet love letter that begins with,
"Do you know my sensations when I see
the sweet characters from your hand?"
It's presumed that the redaction
was done by Hamilton's son, John,
before he published an edition
of his father's papers.
Likely he felt that as this was
documentation of his parents' personal life,
that those details maybe weren't
as important as the other parts
of the letter that describe the battle.
But it's these types of elements that
shed light on aspects of life at that time
that were otherwise excluded
from historic record.
So one of the things that we'd like you to take
away from this presentation is the importance
of preserving the original source
material amidst the digital age.
People are quick to dismiss the
physical object once it's been digitized,
but as you can see there's still
insurmountable value in retaining the original
because as technology advances, you never know
what additional information you'll be able
to draw that could provide new
insight to the object, its creator,
or even the time period that it was made.
So thank you for your attention and
I will pass it back over to Andrew.
>> Great. Thanks, Megan.
So that was a nice example from our
downstairs lab, like I mentioned,
doing non-invasive testing that lets us analyze
and understand objects in the collection.
I'll tell you a little bit about some of the
tests that we do in the upstairs lab looking
at physical materials and seeing what we
can understand about physical materials.
And so, for example, if you look at these
six strips of paper, can we say anything
about the conditions, if any, of them?
Can we say that any one is worse in
condition than any others of them?
And you may look at them and
guess based on their color.
There maybe is one that's discolored.
Maybe another is in better condition.
But really what we need to do and what our
lab does is provide quantitative measure
and analysis to understand routes of degradation
and condition of things that we measure.
So I'm going to step you through a couple
of the techniques that we use in that lab.
A classic is pH and acidity.
We can take paper samples, again obviously
these are test samples or reference materials,
and we can measure their acidity.
This test requires that we take samples,
we blend them, we soak them in water,
and then we measure the pH of
the extract of the solution.
Very chemistry heavy.
There are other ways of measuring
pH of paper, pH pens and strips.
They tend to be less accurate, but they do work.
All of these tests that I'm going to tell you
about have some advantages and disadvantages
of why we might do them,
why we might not do them.
We don't always do all of our
tests on all of our materials.
And this test, it's very intuitive.
People tend to have a good sense
of what an acidic paper means.
It's a long lived standard.
People know what pH of paper means.
But it's destructive.
We are working on ways to miniaturize
those and apply them to other materials
where we may have only a small amount of sample.
In terms of the physical condition of paper,
we have a test called the fold tester.
There's a little animated
gif of it on the left there.
It does exactly what it promises to do.
It takes a strip of paper and it folds it
back and forth over and over and over again.
And you can see the little
counter on the left there.
And it gives you a count for how many
times it folds that paper until it breaks.
Again, this test is really
nice in that it's intuitive.
You immediately understand what
it's doing and what it means
when one paper takes a lot more folds
to make it break until the next paper.
It's also another long lived standard.
If you talk to someone about a fold
tester who's in the paper science world,
they know exactly what you're talking about.
Again, very destructive so
we need reference materials.
We actually need a lot of
reference materials to do this test.
And there's wide variation in the data.
We actually had an intern work
with us and you can see sort
of the error bars down on that plot.
Without understanding anything
else about the data,
you can see that this test
can be widely variable.
So you need to run this test a
lot to get definitive results.
Those past two tests I just talked
about, we've actually turned into a kind
of piloted outreach program for school
age students who have come into our lab,
local students who have come in
and we've kind of walked them
through a series of experiments in our lab.
We let them do the experiments.
They have a pretty good sense of pH and acidity.
We can tie that into chemistry curricula.
This is kind of a nice little
engineering and strength test.
It's also a crowd pleaser.
To be honest, people love seeing it.
Kids love seeing it.
It lets you connect acidity to paper condition.
I talked about the variability in that test.
There's another way we can
assess the strength of paper.
This is called a tensile tester.
It's a little video.
Hopefully it plays.
You grip a sample between two grips and
it's very slowly pulling that strip apart
until you can see a little bit
of a break as that paper breaks.
And so it pulls the sample
in tension until it breaks
and you measure all sorts of
properties as it's doing so.
You measure the force as it's pulling.
You measure the extension, how
far the paper's getting pulled.
It's a little intuitive.
You still kind of get a nice
physical feel for this.
I think most people understand
what strength during pulling is.
It gives you a large amount of quantitative
data, much more than that fold tester does.
That fold tester just tells you
how many folds until it breaks.
That's it.
Doesn't really tell you much more than that.
This test is really nice.
It gives you data kind of on that
chart that you see down there.
This really digs into some
of the engineering concepts
that lots of university students will see.
You can measure the extension until
break, the strength until break.
You can look at the energy of absorption,
how much energy it absorbs during break.
Also fairly destructive.
Samples can be miniaturized.
This is a pretty small sample there, just
a few millimeters by a few millimeters.
It's a lot more expensive than
the other equipment as well,
so it requires a bit more expertise, a
lot more equipment on hand to be able
to do that accurately and reliably.
We have a lot more tests in the lab
and those slowly give us more
and more complex information.
We use these a lot depending on the situation
and what we're trying to
understand about a material.
And I highlight a couple of these because
Finella's going to talk about them in a moment
in a project that we're working on.
But they're things like size
exclusion chromatography.
You can measure the size of the cellulose
molecules themselves that compose the paper.
There's infrared and UV-Vis spectroscopy.
Turns into a fully non-invasive,
non-destructive method compared
to those other ones that I showed you.
And it looks at kind of the chemical group
vibrations and tells you a little bit
about what's going on in the chemical
composition and material composition
of the materials that you're testing.
We also do some thermal gravimetric analysis.
You look at how materials breakdown under heat.
You can ramp it all the way up
until they start combusting.
We had a high school intern come in and do this.
We called it the Fahrenheit 451
project looking at how different papers
of different pulp types behaved
as they got heated and broke down.
All these tests give you much more complex
information, but at the cost of simplicity.
So that's one reason why we kind
of start doing a lot of these tests
and understanding what we can and can't measure.
These in particular I'm showing you, we like.
They're minimally invasive.
We can take a very small amount
of material and make measurements.
But they trade that simplicity.
These are a lot less intuitive than
those other tests I showed you,
but you do get much more complex
information that let you find out things
about the fundamental nature of the
way that materials breakdown over time.
And that is a nice little segue into our
last topic that Finella will tell you about.
>> Thank you, Andrew.
So as you've seen new technologies and
understanding the original material
and how we can think about its
condition to preserve our collection is
that it's a huge part of what we do.
In general, less than 10% of any
collection has been digitized.
And this large paper based collection of
the combined knowledge of the United States
and the world is incredibly
powerful for being able to share
that knowledge and that information.
So we were very delighted to get
a Mellon Funded research project
to assess the condition of
the national collection.
It's a three year project.
It might be on hiatus at the moment.
And we're looking to understand taking
a very tiny strip off of one page
of the same 500 books from 5 different partners.
And this is over the time period of 1840 to
1940 when, of course as many of you know,
they were mass producing books from using
wood pulp and so that's quite acidic.
So it's quite an at risk period
of our historical collection.
And we really want to understand more about
how we can sort of use this knowledge.
Not everyone has the privilege of using the
tests that we have, but can we start to think
about helping protect what's at risk.
And next slide please.
We are really delighted to have five research
partners from five different climatic areas
within the States, Cornell, University of
Miami, University of Washington, Arizona State,
and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Amazing research library partners.
And they are allowing us to analyze the
same 500 volumes from all of the partners.
And the Library of Congress has also got
the same 500 so it'll get us to the total
of 3,000 volumes to analyze and
look at and see what we're finding.
Next slide please.
We have a public facing website,
nationalbookcollectoin.org,
and this gives you much more in
depth overview of the study itself.
I just wanted to introduce it here.
Go through the methodology, the timeline,
and a list of the 500 books that we have.
Next slide please.
So what's really interesting, we're
finding so many fascinating things,
but we've looked at what identical
says is not actually what it is.
So what you're seeing here are five carts
left to right of essentially the same volumes
from five different research
libraries of what they had.
And we just did not realize or
expect to see so much variability.
Some books were twice the size even though
they said they were the same volume.
The paper was thicker.
There were clearly different bindings.
But really a lot of difference
of what is identical.
Next slide please.
What has been even more fascinating is that
you can see very clearly in this slide,
and I think if you click there's
one more down in the corner,
but we have seen up to sometimes five
different paper types in the same volume.
Now realize that when these were printed,
those papers would have looked the same.
So what we're seeing is the impact of the
inherent property of the paper itself,
as Andrew was talking about, which
is so important to the viability
and the preservation of that particular volume.
One thing we're just starting to tease
out is we'll be looking at this in terms
of the catalog information
because we realize that people
in libraries can't necessarily
do all of these tests.
But, can we start to see trends
from a certain publisher,
a certain decade, a certain subject heading.
We were tending to see a lot more of
these multiple papers in what we've looked
at to date in more popular fiction books.
So, I encourage you to visit the website.
We've also a TPT talk that has just gone
online, topic and preservation theories
from Preservation Week that explains a lot more.
But I want to make sure we've
got plenty of time for questions.
And I will stop there and open
up to Colleena and questions.
>> Great. Thank you so much, Finella, and
thanks Andrew and Megan for that overview
and also just giving us more
of an in depth look of some
of your projects and the scope of your work.
There is a question actually that's more
about you as scientists and your career.
So Amara has asked, she says, "As a
K-5 STEM teacher, I encourage students
to seek various pathways
to STEM related careers.
What led you to the Library
of Congress as a scientist?"
So if you could talk a little bit about, yeah,
your career path to the library and your,
I guess, professional background.
So, Andrew, if you want to start?
>> Yeah, sure.
No problem.
So I was always interested in a STEM career,
but that's kind of my path is I
started down that way from the get go.
And I found the library and the
library's labs a lot later in my career.
So I did my undergraduate in chemistry.
I did my PhD work in polymer science
and engineering specifically.
And then I went and worked in the
private sector for a few years.
I worked at 3M and 3M does a lot
of work with plastics and polymers.
So I worked on adhesives and light reactive
materials and the way that light interacts with,
you know, those adhesives and
colors them or discolors them.
And then I ended up looking to
transition out of the private sector
and that's when I found the library.
And I can't say that I was intentionally
zeroing in on the library from the get go,
but there was a very strong overlap between
the kind of research that the library does
on adhesives and paper and the things that I
had a background in that I found fascinating.
I was always a lifetime reader,
so obviously the library
and what the library represents
is really interesting to me.
And so, a whole bunch of UsaJob
applications and interviews later,
that's kind of how I found my way to PRTD.
>> Great. Great.
Then, Megan, what about you?
You mentioned your fine arts background,
which I think is just so fascinating.
What was your path to the library?
>> Yeah. So I was pretty academic heavy in high
school, but decided to change gears for college
and went for a degree that's a
mix of fine art and art history.
So, I kind of came to the
cultural heritage institutions
from a curatorial standpoint more so.
And it wasn't until I actually
interned in an art museum that I learned
about the science behind
cultural heritage preservation.
You know, I knew about traditional conservation
of documents and paintings and art and whatnot,
but to see the science in action was just,
you know, kind of really sparked that for me.
And so, I moved from there and just
kind of transitioned into the research
and testing division at the library.
I think that, you know, even though I don't
have a traditional science background, you know,
colleagues are great to work with.
I think that, you know, still bringing that
different viewpoint to the table, you know,
I'm still working with photography so
I still have that kind of connection.
You know, it's still really important
and really makes for some great research
within our labs having those different
expertise and different backgrounds.
>> Yes, definitely, the different perspectives.
And, you know, we see that
at the library, of course.
You know, there's many of us who have,
you know, library science backgrounds.
And then there are also many of us who don't.
And so those different viewpoints
we find are, yeah,
super critical and really benefit our work.
And Finella, of course, yeah it's
great to hear more your background
and what led you to the library
and PRTD as well.
>> So as some of you may realize
I have a deep southern accent.
I'm originally from New Zealand.
My background, I was a textile
scientist working with fabrics,
everything from geotextiles
to natural to manmade fabrics.
And through a couple of studies, one
was looking at strength of paper towels
for a consumer magazine, looking at color
differences, and I got particularly interested
when I was working for a local
museum looking at Maori cloaks
on indigenous people, the whatu kakahu cloaks.
They are used and worn by the local Iwi
tribe and could I come up with a very simple,
minimally invasive test that would
let them know what [inaudible].
So that's sort of where I started to come into
the museum and the cultural heritage field.
So a bit of a checkered background
as you're hearing from all of us.
I then got a call from the Smithsonian
Institution and I came onboard as a scientist
for the Star Spangled Banner project and
Hilary Clinton's Save America's Treasures.
And from there went up to New York.
I ended up working on the World Trade Center
archives, Ellis Island Immigration Museum,
and there's lots of phone calls in my past.
I got a phone call from the library.
They wanted someone to come on as a contractor
for a specific project and at the time I was
in the process of I had my green card,
but was moving towards citizenship.
And I then came on board at the library.
And I, you know, was so surprised.
Initially I just didn't realize
what a rich resource.
I thought about books and,
you know, parchment of course,
but just the collections we have are phenomenal.
And I'm always learning with everything
from Mets, from museum instruments,
pre-Columbian ceramics, photographs, cartoons.
And so as you've heard from Andrew
and Megan, that different perspective
and all of the staff have a
slightly different background,
it builds together a really strong
group that we can add to all the time.
And being able to work directly
with the conservators
and with curators is incredibly
interesting and important to have that sort
of iterative collaborative process because
that's how we all learn and move this forward.
And so I wasn't particularly
interested in history as a child
because in New Zealand we only learned
about World War I and World War II
and they didn't seem very exciting to me.
So it's funny to sort of come round to a field
where history is so important to what we do
and all of the different material
types I learned as part of my PhD
and undergrad were important and
critical to all of our heritage materials.
>> So interesting.
It's great to hear that the difference in your
background and sort of how you brought this kind
of interdisciplinary sort of lens and how
that's developed since you've been here.
That's one of the cool things
about working at the library.
I agree with that.
We have a couple other questions
to see in the chat.
So Dana has asked about your recommendations
on coursework for preservation science.
So what courses would you recommend someone take
if they're interested in preservation science
or book multimedia preservation or conservation?
Any recommendations or types of classes?
>> So I would say we do find, as you've
probably seen, chemistry is really important.
Having a understanding to be
able to think about material.
So material science, and the
specificality of those materials
and how they degrade is really
a strong part of that.
Much of the techniques that we have can and are
taught in the lab, but that is a strong one.
The other one I've been gently encouraging
people towards, which may not seem as intuitive,
is we can collect an awful lot of data and
how do we look at all of those different peeks
on a spectral you saw from
some of Andrews graphs.
You know, multiple data points here.
So actually coding and starting to
get into machine learning are some
of the really powerful areas that help
us quickly interpret and move faster
with understanding the information
that we've got.
I'll hand over to Andrew and Megan to add.
>> I think that sounds about
right to me in terms of, yeah,
cultural heritage science,
chemistry, material science.
There always seems to be a place for people
looking for those kinds of information.
I know the STEM fields in general have
been pushing for more STEAM connections,
adding the A in for arts because there really
is a lot of overlap between STEM and arts topics
in a lot of ways that people might not expect.
They're not as divided as I think
is kind of culturally assumed.
And that's one thing we try to do sometimes
with visiting students from K-12 is we try
to show them why should you care about pH?
If you're interested in art,
why should you care about pH?
If you're interested in, you know,
cultural heritage, materials,
why do you need to understand what a X-ray is?
And we'll show them that this
is how we use it every day,
which I think has been helpful
communicating that as early on as we can.
>> And I think, Andrew, made the really
good point, you know, with the background.
Having some historical background, you know,
I did a lot of work on history of arts,
and that we often find, you know,
the crossover is very important.
>> Yeah, I definitely liked what you said about
showing students at least or really anyone kind
of the specific applications of, you know,
these kind of abstract concepts they
may have learned about in school.
But I think the ability or the possibility
of seeing why this matters in the real world
and what the actual implications
and I guess consequences
of these concepts can be
is I think very powerful.
Mike has asked--
>> And one interesting example--
>> Oh sorry, go ahead.
>> So I think one interesting
example is, you know,
in high school when I memorized the
periodic table, hydrogen, helium, lithium,
beryllium, boron, carbon, anyway.
For the kids to see that we still use that,
you just see this little light
bulb go off and like, "Oh."
So it's interesting.
>> Yeah. Right.
>> And within that, humanities is a
narrative connection that drives it, right?
Like if you remember learning about pH and, you
know, if you're not a scientist and you think,
yeah I learned about pH. And when we measured
the pH of lemon juice, I already know the pH
of lemons juice is, put Alexander
Hamilton's letters onto that,
suddenly people start to
get a lot more interested.
>> Right. You sort of build in kind of
there's a narrative piece, there's context,
and you have a more concrete sense of
what's at stake and what the application is.
Absolutely.
Sort of along those lines, Mike has asked,
he said, he'd love to hear another story
from the team about a time they
discovered something in a document
that made everyone on the team super excited.
So anything jump out at you or any, you know,
surprise moments that really
got you excited discovery wise?
>> Sure. I can-- oh go ahead.
>> Please, no go ahead Megan.
>> One of the projects that is near
and dear to my heart is getting to work
with the Herb Locke political
cartoon collection.
He was a political cartoonist for The Washington
Post from the late 70s until he died in 2001.
And so we have all of his cartoons, a lot
of his drawings, and we were very fortunate
that the conservator at the time who was
collecting these materials grabbed a lot
of his markers and stuff that he was
actually using on these cartoons.
And so because they have to be on exhibit,
that was kind of part of the agreement was
that we would host them for the public to
see, you know, we have to be very careful
about making sure nothing
is at risk and whatnot.
So we did a lot of testing and being
able to make up our own test samples
with the pens off of his desk and stuff.
And that was just really, really fun.
And being from a fine art background, you
don't think about the longevity of your work.
You know, a lot of us in art school do what's
called dumpster diving where, you know,
you just go and you pick up, you
know, we don't have a lot of money.
We go and we work with found
materials and, you know,
whatever we can find that's cheap and whatnot.
And it was really kind of like an
ah-ha moment for me because, you know,
it wasn't until my senior year in college
that I thought, "Well, maybe I should get,
you know, the tape that's not acidic.
You know, maybe I should go
for that kind of a feature."
So, you know, learning about these, I think that
it's really important to kind of get that kind
of information out to groups
of people, you know,
that wouldn't necessarily be
aware of this kind of research.
So from an art perspective, you
know, I really enjoyed that project
and everything that it taught me.
>> And I just want to say, it's that question
that I always, "Oh, which one do I choose?"
Because there are so many fascinating things.
I'm going to quickly give two quick examples.
Often a lot of what we're doing is
kind of a forensic type analysis.
We don't have a nice written notebook
that tells us exactly what has
happened to this object in its history.
And so at one point we were looking
at a early Armenian manuscript to try
and understand why some of
the segments were degrading.
And we realized that often people were
borrowing from other technologies.
So what we actually found in this, where they
were using a very expensive blue pigment,
aquamarine, to highlight important
areas of the illuminated manuscript,
but then a cheap material from the
glass making industry, [inaudible],
to extend the more expensive one.
So it was a really early
example, way before they thought
that it had been used in manuscripts.
It was a decade early than people
thought that was being used.
So it was a really interesting
transfer from one technology to another.
Another example was looking at
some documents from South America
where they had obviously brought traditional
inks from Europe, but when they started to run
out of things in the New World, they
started adding pigments from there.
So we started seeing indigo added
into the ink as an extender.
So this is some of the things
we start to see, you know,
just sort of really interesting little
insights into how the people are thinking
or the decisions they made
that we kind of take to uncover
and then sort of piece together years later.
>> That's so interesting what you're
saying about your discoveries,
which actually prompts a question that I had.
I can't remember if it was Megan or
Andrew, but one of you mentioned this idea
of your analytical question or
I guess your research question.
And I was fascinated by how
you said that, you know.
So my background is in humanities.
I studied language and literature.
And so when I think of analytical questions,
I have a sense of what I mean when I say that.
But I wondered if you could give kind of an
example of an analytical question that you use
in your research and if that's something that's
kind of derived by your team or if that comes
from a curator that you're working with.
If you could just say a little bit about that.
>> Sure. So as Andrew touched on, you know, when
we get what we consider analytical requests,
they either usually come from the conservation
division or from curators or from scholars
where it's kind of these
one off questions of trying
to understand a component of
a cultural heritage material.
So that could be wanting to
understand what is this pigment,
as Andrew said, what is this stain?
Is it something that's going to
be at risk that we need to treat?
It could be some things like the things
I was talking about looking at, you know,
hidden writing, things that are obscured.
Can we bring this information
back to make it more visible
to understand more about this document?
We look at things like watermarks
to look at provenance of documents,
thinking like about creation
techniques, things like that.
So I think when I say analytical
techniques, I think that's kind
of our thinking of how we're using that.
And I don't know if Finella
wants to talk a little bit
about our outreach recently
to the humanities section.
Every year we have a peer Mellon fellow that is
strictly from the humanities section and working
with them on their PhD questions and larger,
broader questions of how can science help them
understand from the humanities side of things.
>> Yeah, thanks Megan.
So one of the things that we all feel--
you can clearly tell we love what we do--
but how do we make science not scary?
Because we're all talking about the same thing,
but it's from just a slightly
different viewpoint.
And so we've worked very hard to talk
with people who may not be working
in the lab all the time to just be able
to say, "This is what I want to do."
They don't need to know what
instrument will do that.
And often that helps stimulate
us to develop new applications.
And what Megan was to, and I'd be
happy to get that link to you to add,
Colleena, but it's really exciting.
Chuck Henry, who's the president of Clear,
had come into a lab and instantly understood
that the techniques we use can elicit so
much information from original materials.
So there's now a place every year for a
dissertation fellow and original sources to look
at collections from the Library of
Congress and use any of the techniques,
non-invasive of course, non-destructive, from
within our lab to help them answer questions.
So we have an upcoming presentation
from our current dissertation fellow,
Malina Cravens [assumed spelling], who
has been looking at trying to understand
from the documents from South America can
we see whether there's staining on there
to see how they were more heavily used?
Were they transcribed from
the priests or from local?
You know, how were they using
these in the pedagogical sense.
So what's really exciting for us, and sort of
coming back to what you were saying, Colleena,
is what are those questions that help stimulate
us but sort of open up and delve into areas
of our collection that we may
not have thought about before.
It's sort of a couple of different ways.
It either comes to us from
a researcher or a curator.
If it's a researcher directly, we ask them
to work with the curator of that collection
because the curator has to approve the question
before we can do some work on the collection.
The conservator, who's often coming
from a more preservation perspective.
And within we develop longer
term research studies
within preservation research and testing.
But based on what we've seen, so if we're
seeing things that seem more at risk,
for example Megan mentioned the Herb Lockes
and they had to go on exhibit and some
of pens were fading, can we
come up with a simple way of,
and this is some of what we're talking
about with the national collection,
of helping answer these questions
and protect more at risk materials
by being proactive rather than reactive?
>> Right. And actually that prompted
another question about the example
that you gave of Jefferson's rough draft.
So Megan, you mentioned that there
was a researcher who I guess in going
through Jefferson's journals
at Princeton I think you said,
sort of came across I guess this
possible explanation for why
"subjects" had been scratched out
and "citizens" had replaced it.
How did that come about?
Was that a curator who came to you and said,
"We're not sure what's under this smudge.
Can you take a look?"
Or did it come through a different channel?
>> I don't want to take credit for this.
That admittedly was all Finella's work.
So I can let her elaborate on that.
>> That's great.
>> That's sweet, Megan.
Thank you.
So we were imaging a number of important
documents at the library and this was one.
The smudge was not apparent.
This was during what we call Snowmagedon.
I was going out shoveling.
That takes a lot of time to process these
things and so I would try one technique.
I'd seen sort of a smudge, but I
couldn't really see anything else.
And kept delving into it.
Finally started to see some
of the underneath words.
And we essentially sort of figured out the word
before I'd found the references at Princeton.
I was determined that it was too
important for someone not to know about it.
I couldn't believe that no
one would know about it.
And finally found this researcher at Princeton,
I'm sorry, I'm just blanking on his name,
who had been looking at Jefferson's
notes and he noticed that he was copying
from the Virginia Constitution that
was written two months earlier.
And he realized, as Megan said, as
soon as he wrote this, this was wrong.
He said, "I expunged it never to be seen again."
Which sort of raises another point that I
kind of got a little bit mad at that point
because he didn't want us to know.
My director at the time told
me to get over it really fast.
But that is something we do take into account
if we're looking at collections that belong
to special groups, native tribes.
We are very careful about what is actually
released so that is always a discussion
with the curator or the people who own
or are in charge of those collections.
>> That's so interesting.
Well, thank you, Finella, for your, as
Cheryl pointed out, your persistence.
She said, "Finella's persistence to
technology applied and [inaudible] itself."
So thank you, Cheryl for that comment and thank
you Finella for, yeah, for all you did there.
That's just so interesting.
And I think just back to Andrew and Megan's
points about the applications of science
and the sort of interdisciplinary
impact that this can have.
I think that's just such a great example.
Trying to just make sure I haven't missed
any questions or comments from the chat.
There's some good comments.
I hope that Finella, you'll have
a chance to look at the chat
because there's some good comments here.
And Megan and Andrew, I hope that you've
been able to follow along as well.
And, you know, thank you so much for being with
us today and sharing your expertise and some,
you know, really fascinating examples of
your work that show why it's, you know,
so important to the work that the library
does and just frankly really cool.
So thank you so much for
being here with us today.
>> Yeah, thanks for having us.
I think we're always happy
to geek out about stuff.
>> Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, that's great.
And thank you everyone who's
joined us today live.
And if you're listening via
recording in the future, thank you.
And we hope that you enjoyed the discussion.
Just so you know for next week, we'll be
hearing from James Wintle [assumed spelling]
from the Music Division and he'll be talking
about various digital music resources
that you can use in the classroom.
And he'll be focusing specifically on ragtime.
So I really hope that you can join us.
And also, please feel free to
checkout other Office Hours.
They have materials available on
the website including recordings
as well as PowerPoint slides.
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will be available as a recording
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So thank you again for joining us and we
look forward to seeing you again very soon.
Take care.
Thanks everyone.