Protecting our treasures
Aug 12th, 2013 by adharris
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.
The Santo Domingo Collection often comes across volumes that need a little extra TLC before being sent to their forever homes. Sometimes the binding is no longer attached, the cover has been ripped, or the material needs a special enclosure to protect it. Who do we turn to? The very talented preservation folks! My hard working colleagues in the Collections Conservation Lab in Widener routinely deal with preservation issues regarding materials in Harvard’s collections. They have an area devoted to preservation review, collections care, conservation treatment, reformatting preparation, and construction of protective enclosures. The volume Histoire de l’Asie was in fragile paper covers with a slightly detached spine so they constructed a hardbound volume allowing one to look at it safely. Special enclosures are another approach to protecting an item especially when it is small or an unconventional shape or size. And voila- De Profundis is now safely tucked away! Dust jackets often provide important contexual information about a volume particularly for the Santo Domingo materials which have a lot of fascinating covers chronicling drug culture and psychedelic experiences of the 60s and 70s. As one might imagine dust jackets can be pretty fragile and tear easily so the Lab uses a machine that encases the jacket in plastic to protect it.
All of the people that work in the Lab are an integral part of the processing of this collection, not to mention the countless other materials in the Harvard Library, so I offer up a big thank you to them all!
The Dancing Stones / Leonard Alfred Knight. London :Sampson Low, Marston & Co.,[1946].
Thanks to Alison Harris, Santo Domingo Project Manager for contributing this post.