Staff from the Preservation Lab responded to a water emergency at the IU Art Museum. Most of the items were clerical files which were brought to the Lab where a combination of both air drying and freeze drying was used on the affected materials.
Approximately 20 monographs were received and treated from the Herman B Wells Library that had suffered water damage.
Seven tours were provided by the Lab staff. Some of the groups/individuals for whom these tours were conducted included: INDIGO (Indiana Government Documents Librarians), staff from the IU Music Library, Liz Dube – the conservator from Notre Dame, members of an IU Committee who are working on the design of a film preservation facility, and SLIS (IU School of Library & Information Science) alumni.
The Preservation Lab staff toured both the Wiley House Museum and the Monroe County Historical Society. We saw a number of items at the Wiley House that, depending on our resources for the coming years, we could provide preservation assistance with.
The Paper Lab is continuing to work on a large project for the Lilly Library that involved the rehousing of medieval manuscript fragments. During the quarter 112 fragments were rehoused.
The Paper Lab worked with a student volunteer, Krista Grant, for the semester. Krista contributed approximately 144 hours of volunteer work.
The General Collections Unit and the Paper Lab combined to treat 2,500 items during the quarter. Of these 93 were treated by the Paper Lab staff (the 112 medieval manuscripts are excluded from this count) and the remaining 2,407 were done by the General Collections staff. Of the total, the breakdown as to category of treatment was:
Level I: 905
Level II: 244
Level III: 137
Enclosures: 1,090 (does not include Kasemake enclosures)
Miscellaneous: 124
The Lab experienced a significant increase in materials from the Fine Arts Library [FAL] including a number of items from the FAL special collections and Artist’s Book collection. These are usually items for which custom enclosures are made.
There were 1,545 enclosures made using the Kasemake box making machine. This number has been decreasing in recent months. The decrease can be attributed to (1) the original backlog of materials that were in the work queue has been eliminated; (2) staffing changes in the Lilly Library which resulted in a temporary slow-down of requests (this has recently changed and the number of requests has begun to return to normal); and, (3) we have changed how we think about materials being placed in ALF II and do not necessarily build an enclosure for all items that might benefit from such service but rather wait for an item to circulate and be returned before putting it in an enclosure.
Bindery Prep processed 4,377 items during the quarter. Of these, 1,852 were serials and 1,754 were for items from the William & Gayle Cook Music Library. In addition, there were 591 paperback items that were processed by the Bindery Prep unit.
The primary work of the Lilly Library Conservation Technician has been, as is normal, with exhibit preparation although she regularly spends 20-35% of her time working on projects, usually making custom enclosures, in the Lab. Installations included: Literary Sketches, Science Fiction, Pregnancy & Childbirth, Mathematics & Play Puzzles, Preservation Week exhibition in Wells, The Music Man, MacAuley at Oldfields, and six student exhibits. Fifty-two phase boxes and eight clamshell enclosures were constructed for the Lilly Library collections in addition to 23 phase boxes and forty trays (with handles) for the Puzzle Collection.
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