Amazing collection of Cultural Heritage in the form of books, paper, photographs, matts, letters, drawings, audiovisual materials and regularly used by researchers who come from another part of the country to work on a book and Research Projects and we always make them available in the reading room so we have to have all the collection is ready for researh at any given time. Given the care and handling that can sometimes inflict damage, they needed a conservation staff to keep the books in working order so this is one of the current projects and the book Conservation Lab. It is from 1475, and it is bound between two enormous pine boards and it was brought into the Conservation Lab because i they had become detached from the block and i needed to reattach it because it is used quite frequently in regular semester classes and a Summer Research institute here at the library. They used to be a single piece and over the centuries they have split. Theyve been stabilized by an Objects Conservator and my job was to reattach the board and ultimately reattach this loose piece here. You can see where it used to be long because the nail holes are here and you can see where the rust stained parchment matches up with the iron nail so you know where it needs to go back on the board. You can also see this sort of swirly pattern here is the old animal and he said that the previous binder used to this the parchment in place. Once all the treatment is done to the interior of the book, the last step will be to place the original letter spine back on the book. It was still in stitch when i first started working on the bucbook but in order to have acs to the spine to apply the parchment slips, i needed to peel off the original and set it aside. Sort of like working under the hood, popping the hood, working on the movable parts of the book, and then i will put the spine back on. And i think once you do, it will actually fit pretty well and covered up a lot of the work, a lot of the traces of the work i did so that it will be much more visually unobtrusive. This i will reattach with wheat starch paste that is a very flexible adhesive that ages well and it is cooked. We use it in conservation because you can apply it in a variety of thicknesses and you start with a powder, very pure wheat powder and cook it with water and you get a very thick blob that sort of wiggles. Then, depending on the type of repair that you are doing, you strain it, add water and make it very thin if you are going to do a man on a piece of paper using japanese tissue. But if youre going to do work with leather you would send it to me because the consistency of heavy cream may be thicker and you would apply ihe would applyr and let it soak in and apply another layer and adhere it to the original spine. Conservation process starts with a curator or library and member of the staff who in the course of their work sees ebook is in Poor Condition and they may know it is going to be needed for a class the next semester so they will contact me and say that give me some parameters about what the book is, what the letter is, how it is that the library and i start to do an assessment of the item. I will assess the structure, the material, the level of damage or degradation and then i work with the curator responsible for the collection area to say this is the work that i think needs to happen. What is your input in terms of the Historical Context and significance of the structure or the materials i may not know about and then together we work on a treatment plan to make sure that the collection item can then go back to the library and be used safely. This is a Thomas Jefferson letter that he wrote in response to a constituent i guess. I cant remember. I think he was president at the time. The letter was passed on i believe to a descendent in the family and those family members tried to keep the letter together over the years and use different kinds of tape to put the letter back together as it fell apart from handling and being folded and being opened and folded so there are different campaigns of tape here and here and then these orange spot were also taped. When the letter came to us, it was framed and it had been on display for many years so there was a lot of light damage that was also causing problems advancing the staining of the residual adhesive from the tape and also making the paper very brittle. Now, you need to remove adhesives and paper thats causing damage. The difficulty in this case is the paper had degraded so much from the tape from being on display at working with it even as you are removing the tape and paving it to take out the acidic degradation product in the paper, the paper starts to fall apart and break so after its washed and dried, you have to spend a lot of time putting all these pieces back together and using your before treatment documentation to make sure that youve got everything oriented correctly and making sure that all the folds and all the lines match up the baby are supposed to. I used a slow application of solvents by making a poultice with folders are scum and you make this little no mound that looks kind of like an ant hill. Use around the area with the residual adhesive and then you get another sort of party that youve damaged with a solvent and then you put the party in the middle and that will slow the draw o the adhesives out of the paper and into the party. So the paper or the letter looks really strange because you have all these little mountains that look like little ant hills all over it. And then you wait a few hours for it to dry and carefully brush it away and disdain goes from being a translucent to being opaque which means its made progress. The letter still went through a lot, so its never going to look as perfect as the day Thomas Jefferson signed it but its not going to look any worse. You start with the level of damage and degradation, the strength of the material you have to work with and then talk with a curator or the instruction outreach librarian and say how is this i am going to be used as it could be handled in the classroom, or is it just going to be put on an exhibit and not pitched that much or is it just going to be digitized and then put away because it is very lightsensitive or very fragile. For example, we have a very large collection of glass plate negatives those are very delicate items, so we have chosen to scan them so that they are available digitally and then the originals are wrapped in safe packaging and stored away in strictly controlled climate storage so this is a letter from thomas to Thomas Jefferson, anything really Poor Condition and the aim that the author used to write the letter has corroded and spectacular fashion so that pieces of paper are dropping out and they are dropping out where the letters and the sentences have literally eating through the paper. Now, this ink is naturally corrosive. People back in the day used actual lost data plan a wasp lays an egg, they fly up to a tree, they put their little abdomen up against the tree comes down through the bark of the tree, lay the egg, the tree says wait a minute, this is not tree and starts to push about and thats hoit outand thats hs lump. Somehow, people came up with the idea of cutting these off trees and using them to initiate a Chemical Reaction as long as you mix it with meredith, iron filings in some water to make this ink. The ink naturally corrodes inserts of kind of yellow and clear and then it turns a dark brown as the air mixes to dry it. But in the case of this letter, this really unusual corrosion in the form of this sort of yellow opaque maybe kristol may be Something Else that has risen to the surface of the paper and we are not really sure whats going on so we tr tried to find an ext to work with to help us come up with a sort of responsible treatment proposal. Traditional or standard corrosion we can put it in a chemical bath that will stabilize the ink but unless you are sure that is what you have going on, you dont want to just put something in a chemical bath. So we will do some more research and see if we can come up with a way to at least stabilize the letter if we cant actually give a Chemical Treatment that would remove the corrosion. You dont make an attempt every time to read you have to be honest about your skills and knowledge and also aware that Conservation Research is ongoing with regards to paper, ink, all kinds of material and you may not have the knowledge now but that doesnt mean someone wont figure out the issue later on so if you cant in good conscience make Something Better off by physical intervention, you have to be very honest as a collection manager and with the librarians and say i can do this much right now and we will put it in a box and make a digital image and then put it away for safe keeping. The training is incredibly challenging. You have to do art history training or take classes, you have to take general chemistry, organic chemistry, you have to have natural talent with regards to hand skills. You have to be patient, very thoughtful. You can have certain skills with art but if you dont have the patience or the commitment to doing research and thoughtfulness, it is not going to work. I work in book and paper but there are those that work in plastics and there are conservatives that work on the film and the goal is to make the Cultural Heritage available to whomever is interested. The san antonio book festival beginning of content with 38 programming schedule includes author discussions with carl jacoby in his book the texas slave became a millionaire. 2 50 jeff with his book the road to jonestown, jim jones and the peoples temple. 3 p. M. , lydia with her book the inspiring story this was held last weekend we hold off the day with carl jacoby tells the story of William Ellis who later became known as the lead co a slave turned wall street