This is an archive of posts from both my old blogs (Digital Cellulose, Chartex project) and my current Tumblr blog, Conserve This!
Carefully opening a sealed commemorative box of Kellogg’s corn flakes in the conservation lab. The emptied box will go live a happy life in one of our Archives collections. No, I’m not going to taste the cereal… 😛
What tape does to paper. You can see my fingers through the tape, which has made the paper translucent.
Here in the lab there’s no issues,With using our tissues,Except when you sneeze,We ask you quite please,Use the Kleenex and not the Sekishu! There once was a company named Demco,Whose products were used with a gusto,On spines they would drape,The most marvelous tape,Removing its really quite slow, yo. I work in a book-fixing lab,this makes […]
I’d like to dissent with the view that you should let your book-devouring pets near your library books.
I had a dream last night where I was examining something very closely for a private client and got a smudge of my lipstick on it. I surreptitiously tried to rub it off with my sleeve but only some of the lipstick came off. What a nightmare!
Today in the conservation lab…I’m evaluating books from our circulating collection, to determine if we should have them withdrawn or order replacements. These are books that, for some reason, cannot be easily or efficiently repaired. Many of them are brittle, but others are missing many of their pages due to vandalism, or cannot be rebound […]
Making paste on a Monday morning.
I always thought that the phrase “bindery discharge” sounded like the name of a disease that only afflicts bookbinders. In reality it means the damaged book can go directly to the bindery without any additional preparation by the preservation lab. This is often because it is an adhesive bound book, so the spine will just […]
Could you pass this dexterity test? If you interview for a job in my lab – as in many other library conservation labs – you will have to take a test like this to demonstrate your manual dexterity. This is just one example of a dexterity test that we used in the past. The test […]