Check out installment #1 – https://libapps.libraries.uc.edu/thepreservationlab/2013/10/adhesive-man/
Chris Voynovich (PLCH) — Conservation technician
Adhesive Man! #2
Chris Voynovich (PLCH) — Conservation technician
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Chris Voynovich (PLCH) — Conservation technician
And now, for something really amazing…students and volunteers!
Our Preservation Lab has, for many years had the help of some unsung heroes in the form of our student assistants and volunteers. Although we appreciate them very much, they rarely get the attention that they deserve. As the student supervisor for Preservation Services it has been my job to interview, hire, and train our student assistants. When I interview prospective candidates, I usually look for two basic things, one being on time, and the other being appropriately dressed. The rest is just instinct and gut feeling. Our department has been extremely fortunate in the high caliber of student assistants who have worked for us but sometimes it’s obvious that the applicant would not be a good fit. A few years ago we had a candidate who arrived wearing a barbed wire belt and who asked if it was okay if he sometimes came to work bruised and bleeding, since his hobby was ultimate fighting. Even though the applicant seemed like a nice guy, it was not okay.
Meet the collaborative lab's new conservator!
There’s a new face in the Lab these days. Ashleigh Schieszer (pronounced She-zer), our new Conservator and Lab Manager, arrived last week. She hit the ground running just a few days after moving to Cincinnati from Los Angeles, California where she was completing her internship at the Huntington Library. Somehow, though, in the midst of the orientation sessions, getting to know her way around the Lab and meetings with managers and colleagues she found time to sit down for an interview with me.
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Disaster Recovery in your pocket!
At the end of July the State Library of Ohio, with the support of IMLS, organized a two day workshop called Preservation Boot Camp. The workshop covered a myriad of preservation topics – conservation, reformatting, storage and handling, renovation, disaster recovery, and many more. While I took away a ton of ideas from the two day experience, and met dozens of colleagues that I hope to work with in the future, there was one particular tip and trick I just couldn’t wait to institute at our lab ASAP — the Pocket Response Plan (PReP) http://www.statearchivists.org/prepare/framework/prep.htm.
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A Room with a View
“You have a window!”
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Changes in Best Practices
One of the best parts of the formation of our joint lab was the addition of a full time conservator. The University of Cincinnati lab had been performing a variety of conservation repairs or mends on general collection items for years. Tip-ins, tears, tape removal, sewing and spine repairs were all familiar types of mending to those of us who had been working in the existing UC lab. But when our joint lab began and our new conservator, Kathy Lechuga, started we quickly began to see that not all our repairs or mends were up to par. Kathy had a vast knowledge of conservation, including best practices that were more up-to-date. Even straight forward repairs like spine repairs (or re-backs) that haven’t changed much in the last 30 years needed some minor tweaking. But one repair stuck out as needing a major update, a paper hinge repair we had been doing for years and years.
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Bring your talent with you.
What I love about the human race is we can have very similar characteristics or some really, really different ones. Like all the different colors out there or all the different smells, we all have something unique to bring to the table. I am happy to say here at our lab we are sure a mixed bunch of characters.
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Paper, how do I cut thee? Let me count the ways…
A few years ago if someone had asked me what I cut paper with I would have said, “A pair of scissors, of course.” Then I came to the Preservation Lab.
We cut a lot of paper here. It can be in big sheets, little sheets or tiny scraps. It might be heavy or lightweight, made of short fibers like the ubiquitous wood pulp paper or long fibers such as Japanese kozo paper. We use it for different things too. Heavy board for book covers and boxes, corrugated board for different boxes, light board for folders, paper for pages or repairing spines, Japanese paper for mending tears and making hinges, newsprint for waste paper to catch adhesive overflow. With so many variables it helps to have a few options for cutting the paper.
Probably the tool we all use most often for cutting paper is a scalpel. We each have a least a couple at our work station. My go-to scalpel is the #11 which has a fine tip and straight, angular blade. The #23 with its curved edge is good too, depending on the particular task. Scalpels are great when we need to make a nice clean cut trimming excess paper from a repair, or we use them with a metal straight edge when we need to make a long cut that wouldn’t be straight enough if cut with scissors.
It's a clamshell box! with filler!
This blog explains how we construct an acid-free enclosure to protect a book that is too small to stand alone on a shelf. The dimensions of the book in question are approximately 2” X 3”. As a rule University of Cincinnati Libraries requires that all shelved items be at least 5” X 7”.
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An "earie" object to have in the Lab…
Recently we received an unusual item from the University of Cincinnati’s Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions: a prosthetic ear dating to the mid 1950’s accompanied by a small photograph and newspaper clipping depicting the patient modeling the false ear. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, the ear we received in the lab was a primary model used to construct the actual prosthetic, so it would not have been worn regularly by the patient. I have to admit this is one of the more gruesome items I’ve come across in a conservation lab. Not because it’s a prosthetic ear, but more so because improper housing and storage conditions led to deterioration which gave the ear a very bumpy almost wart-like surface appearance…and it looks so real…
The ear and its original housing materials. The photograph and clipping were stored in the yellow envelope.
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