Audio
About this recording
- Topic
- Conservation and Preservation Part 2 7th Archives Workshop
- Speaker
- Unidentified S
- Date
- 2002-09-01
Transcript
Source: Unidentified S – Conservation and Preservation Part 2 7th Archives Workshop – 2002-09-01.mp3 File: unidentified-s-conservation-and-preservation-part-2-7th-archives-workshop-2002-09-01.mp3 Duration: 00:47:27
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And we spent quite a while carefully trying to remove that duct tape from those pieces. So, tapes, unless you're going to repair things, is a no-no. In my hand is a totally destroyed book. I'm working on it right now. It's so totally destroyed. How many have been to military? Just curious. How many have been around the military? Have you seen those little metal cans of glue where you unscrew the cap and it's got that little cap?
That's what that is. This is the first and eighth. And it had some good written information in it. That's what it will do to paper. I had to totally—in fact, I'm going to pass this around. Try to keep it together. Books are put together—I'm not even going to touch that with the glue. Books are put together with what they call airplane cloth or mull. This is what holds the text to the spine. This isn't even airplane cloth. It's got that same glue on it.
I would also let you look at what they did to beef up the spine. That's glued over everything, the same glue. And I'm going to pass this napkin with it. Please feel the glue that they used to put this book together. I had to break it down with toluene and more. So I'm going to start it right here. Kind of be fairly quick, and let's let this pass around. And by the way, that's the stamping of—this is way off.
That's way, way, way—I'll pick it up. And that's improper size, and the gold covering has run like crazy. So I'm going to go ahead and just lay it in the middle. And y'all are welcome to look at that. Keep it together, please. I'd like that back. We do things out of ignorance. Ignorance is not a bad word. It just means that we are not aware of what we're doing. I would be cautious of that. I would really be cautious. And my suggestion is, is if you don't know what you're doing, just don't until you can get in touch.
It's that simple. No moisture yet, but I'm sure those two documents are kind of relaxing pretty good. Why don't you go ahead and here's a good area, and there is some tissue repair. Why don't we do dry cleaning? Okay, here we go. Here we go. Here's some stuff right here that we can dry clean. And there's a couple of pads. I've got some pads over here. Okay. All right. Dry cleaning. Basically what that is, is we're using a type of pad. This one's called Opaline.
This one's from Archival Quality. They're just brand name manufacturers. I don't know whether you can see this or not, but there's little tiny flakes of this stuff. It's rubber that comes out. That's what we use. It's like an eraser, ground-up eraser, but it's a higher quality. Non-abrasive. Non-abrasive material. What we're going to do— Well, it's called a dry cleaning pad. Document cleaning pad. Document cleaning pad.
You can buy the same material that's inside this pad. That's what he's talking about. In tall cardboard jars. And it's a little larger quantity, a little larger in diameter material. Does the same thing. You can find them in your products under document cleaning, okay? What you want to do is, what I do is I just basically just go like so, and it takes out a little pile of this stuff, okay? You can't really see it. I use my finger.
I try not to use it with a glove. My fingers are clean. I've washed my fingers. Always wash your hands before you touch any documents. And what you do is you take, with this little pile of material, and you simply carefully rub it in a little circular motion. What that will do is that will take the dirt and dust off, and sometimes, I'm going to even do a little bit of this, it'll take off pencil mark.
You know, anything that's not, that's an accidental mark or a rub from something. And you just want to go over your entire piece with that.
[00:05:00]
Very light, very light touch, yes. Now, obviously this is a mimeographed piece. I'm not going very hard at all. If you had a piece like this, it'd be easier and you can go a little bit harder. I see people taking their pad and going, No, don't do that. You may want to do that. All you're doing is just using the erasing qualities of the cloth to scrape off whatever is on top of your document. So that's one particular way to use it, and here's this material.
Now, like I say, I didn't use this one very much, but if you notice here, I took off a quarter of the pencil mark right here. And it'll take off marks. It'll take off fingerprint marks. It sometimes works on coffee stains, for those of us that in AA that— No, we've never seen it, right? Hold up one second, and this is important and very important. Bill, Bill Dotson, Henrietta Seiberling, and Dutch Shuckworth all used a lot of pencil notations.
If you use the document cleaning pad, you're going to erase that pencil. So please, please, please do not use it if there's any kind of writing, notes, dates, anything. Do not use it on lead pencil, because I guarantee it'll take it off. I'm sorry, I just had to think about it. There's another product too. It's called Art Sorb. Large cans. Large cans called Art Sorb. It's like a plasticine kind of clay, an eraser kind of Play-Doh kind of stuff.
You can use that to rub a little bit also, and that will also do the same thing. But whatever you do, whatever product that you use, look and see if it says archival safe on it, at least at the very start. Some places say, Oh yes, our materials are archival safe. Do some research on it if you can before you go ahead and use that product. If you buy from Gaylord or Light Impressions or University Products, you can be pretty much guaranteed that most of the materials that they're going to be selling you are what they say. You're not buying a pig in a poke.
So definitely check it out first. Buy quality. Don't say, Gee, you know, I've only got five bucks. I'll go down to this place here and buy this cheap product. You're going to get cheap results. You're going to get damage, and your district or your group or your members in AA are going to be the poorer for it. Buy quality products. Know what you're getting. Are you referring to, like, office depot, things like that?
Are they our type of quality? Some. Have to be very, very, very careful. Yes. Talk about one other thing, too. When you're dry cleaning a document, the only reason, again, I'm handling this, this has not been treated, so I'm not worried about it. I have a flat surface. I will always work on blotter paper because two or three or four sheets, because you've got a little bit of give to it. And then when you are actually rubbing the document transfer pad or document cleaning pad material, please be real careful around holes, around tears, and in particular the corners.
Because if you take and try to pull the corner in, it'll come in. It'll also tear. Be very, very careful when you get to the corners to go from the inside of the document out. Don't try to come in the other way because you'll fold that corner back up. And let's face it, some materials, some materials are brittle enough, I guarantee you, they're going to crack. And then you've got another job to do.
It's called tissue repair. You had a hand up. I was just going to say, isn't it better for us to use these two fingers than to use this one? I take and use mine because I've got pretty large hands, and two fingers will do. But you can actually take all four. It's fine. Just be real, real careful when you get to the edge to just cut it down. Two fingers is probably enough for anything around damage or in particular where there is a tear. Long time.
Where's that one I had right here? I'm passing both of them around. I've gone through a whole bunch of pamphlets, and that's still very, very full. You can see it's still coming out. We've done hundreds of documents in Washington. It still looks like it's just taken out of the bag. There's a lot of material in it. Yeah. What again is that, the material that's in the bag? It's a rubber product. It's a—I'm not exactly sure whether it's India rubber or what does it…
Yeah, it might be art gum. Super soft, grit-free powder that will absorb dirt and dust. And that's all it says. Let's talk about erasers for a little bit.
[00:10:05]
Art gum—who mentioned art gum? Back here, or this one. Only, only, only as a last resort should we get into the erasers. This is a very genteel eraser, and the only thing I would use this for is, we were given, oh, two or three first edition whatnot books where I guess they let their little grandson take a pencil to it. And on the front inside the facing page and the end sheets, it's all full of pencil. Let's face it, a lot of that won't come off.
I will try to get it off, but remember, as long as you're rubbing an eraser on that page, you could do damage. You could weaken the page. What can we do with it? Let's say it's a perfectly conditioned book. Well, it's real simple. I will replace the entire end sheet and the facing page. I have a source that I use of old paper. The old paper is in the 1930s. I'd like to talk about that for a minute because I'm asking for help.
There is a scrapbook. We do not know who manufactured it because nobody, the manufacturer's information is not on it. You know what a large scrapbook is, yay big, yay wide, and yay thick, and it's full of 1930s paper. It is an exact duplicate of your first, second, third, right on down through sixth and seventh printings of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is green, and on the cover it says scrapbook.
So if we will look out wherever we go back to for these things, I am in dire need of one of them. It's a wonderful source. Let's just say that you go to a flea market and you find a big huge book of whatever, praise and poetry or something, and those pages are old 1930s paper. These guys loved—they didn't at first, but now they know what I'm up to—but they love to see you come in. I buy the book from them for a buck, and what I do is I've got my scalpel that I carry with me, and I cut out all those blank end sheets. Old books usually will have four or five pages of blank paper. I can repair two more big books with that old paper.
Be real, real careful, though, when you scalpel it out not to cut the text or cut the cover. And then what really gets them is when you take the book when you're done and say, You can go ahead and sell this now. Then he makes another buck and a half. You got a friend for life that way. Because if you ask him to look for more, he will do that, or she. Somebody had their hand up. I did about the paper.
There's the history of paper. When did it start? I'll be talking about that during deacidification. Okay, because he said 1930s, I'm trying to… Well, that wasn't really good paper. But I see what you mean. We can get a conservation workshop in Arkansas. I'll have Mike, the other conservator who trained in a monastery with the monks up in either Seattle or maybe Washington State or Oregon. You didn't have monks in Seattle. He knows the history of paper backwards and forwards, and I don't know where this workshop is going to go next year.
I would like to see it go, continue, but if it goes to the right place, we will get him on the schedule somehow. He will use the time. Dr. Ferguson will allow us to do that. So, any more questions? Yes. Yeah, I thought I came up with a couple sheets for you for your big book, but they were papers. But I wasn't clear, like they were loose, and it seemed like it might have been even a later type paper, 40s or 50s.
I wasn't sure if that was still the same or not. If there's any doubt, get them to us. Get them to us. Yes, ma'am. Will the material in the dry erase, or the dry cleaning, same, will the material in that go bad before you can use it? No. No. The quickest thing you can do to a letter, let's just say, I'll be darned, it's perfectly flat right now except for one more wrinkle. And you can see what weights will do.
Let's just say you got this letter in, and let's just say that General Service Office sent it, and it's the first one your archive's ever had. The best thing in the world I can do is, where's the acid-free folders? Is just drop it in an acid-free folder. Now, let's just say you got a couple of young ladies or a couple of young guys, or even the old-timers. I like to get the old-timers. Old timers. I like to get the old timers.
You know, I'd like to get Harry back up there with me, and we're going to
[00:15:02]
do some work. It would be wonderful. But if we take and do that, I have them do the simple conservation methods. And if you give them something to do, they get interested as a hog finding an acorn in the woods. I mean, it really happens. And they are excited. Don't have them there without something to do. If you have them there without something to do, they're slowly but surely going to drift away, and you won't see them again until a new energetic bunch comes in.
Now, what can we do with this letter? The best thing in the world we can do is, as long as there's not any writing in there is but this is ink and we're okay, is I just dry clean it. That's all I do. I drop it in an acid-free folder. Also, one of the things that we can do, and this is really nice, is that it's called a Philly folder. Not silly, Philly. Philly, as in Philadelphia. I believe that's where it came from.
In encapsulation, we use a double-stick tape. This is a 3M product, 415 is what it's called, 3M 415. It's a double-stick tape. It's a pH-neutral tape. And you take a piece of Mylar, or 4 or 5D Melinex, I believe is what they're using now, or polyester. And you take and you put a strip of the double-stick tape right here with your piece of Mylar, and you attach it. And then what you do is, once your piece is taken care of, you can simply insert your piece in.
You can close it up. Always hard to do. Probably static electricity. Hard to do with gloves, too. There you go. It might have been too far. And now you can say, Here's my document. You can now handle that document. Please don't put the tape on the fold side of the document, because you picked the—I'm sorry, the folder up, the letter's going to fall out. Yes, you want to put it on the outer side. Some questions, thank you. Did you keep talking about acid-free folders? In our area, we tend to use a lot of sheet protectors, and I haven't heard you talk a lot about sheet protectors.
It would be the archival—Gaylord, Avery, wonderful. Somebody mentioned—who's mentioned Office Depot? Somebody. You can buy big bulk quantities of Averys. Yeah. Sure. Well, it depends on how you're going to display your piece. We have some districts in Washington that put everything into the acid-free plastic page protectors, okay, which is what you're talking about, and they put them in binders. Now that works, but the only problem with a page protector is the top is open. Now, as archivists, we need to remember that there's environmental damage out there, especially in this day and age, and later on we'll be talking about encapsulation.
Especially in California. Encapsulation covers all four sides, okay? This thing cannot get environmental damage, but a piece of page protector with your piece inside is open to one side, and that allows any type of atmosphere to come in. Which is going to deteriorate your piece. So it depends on what—are you putting copies of things in page protectors to protect them? Fine, go ahead and do that. Are you putting original letters in page protectors to show them?
Well, as a temporary protection, yes, I'd say rather than leaving them in a pile in a folder, yes, go ahead. But you have to think somewhere down the line, what am I ultimately going to be doing with this document? How is it ultimately going to be protected? Yes. Well, how are you going to seal it? Most—well, most eight-and-a-half by eleven size page protectors fit an eight-and-a-half by eleven size sheet of paper that go right to the top. Do you want to trim off a quarter inch of your document?
Well, that one's double-sided, so do you have to—do they make a similar product that you can just do from the outside of it like that? Avery's and these that she's talking about, as I remember, the letters pretty well fit in. Just right in there and that's it. Yeah. I mean, that's it. You can, you could put—you could. The only problem about that, though, is what happens if you turn your—say you put, you know, you've used a piece of archival-safe pH neutral tape over the two sides to cover the top, and your document gets turned upside down.
[00:20:03]
Where does that document go? It goes right onto the tape. On the tape. And then you turn it back this way and it is now stuck to this, and you try and remove it, you could rip and cause damage to your document. Well, first off, let me explain that. I really want to discourage you from doing this. There are comic book collectors out there that put their comics in plastic bags just like that, with a little flap over the top.
And I'll be talking about this this afternoon after lunch on deacidification. What happens during deacidification? The sulfur dioxide gases in the paper—that was produced, and we'll talk about that, from the late 1800s to about 1965—used the sulfur process, where they used the sulfuric acid in the process to bind the lignin fibers together in the paper and to use it as a bleach. Well, after 40 years, your paper starts liberating sulfur dioxide gas. That's what causes the paper—ever seen old newspapers?
They turn brown. We've got an example right here. We'll be showing you some of these. Now, of course, these ones are—we can all blame Charles and these people for this. Here's tape on their newspapers, and you see how it's turned brown? That is acidified with the tape. But every one of these has turned brown. That's acidification. Okay, Bob told us a wonderful example at one time where he had two pieces of newspaper that were very badly acidified.
One he encapsulated, he deacidified and encapsulated, and one he didn't. And he showed his assembly. He took the one that was encapsulated, nothing happened. He went to this one, and it dissolved into myriad little tiny pieces of paper. That's what happens with acidification. Comic book people will put their books inside these— Plastic bags, enclose it. What happens when you enclose something that's liberating bad agent or sulfuric acid, sulfur dioxide gas?
It concentrates. And as it gets more and more and more gas inside this, it increases and it causes the deacidification to increase exponentially. And so I don't recommend that kind of process. I recommend encapsulation or putting it into a folder with a buffered paper in between. That's what we do in our repository. Like Bob was saying, we don't show the original pieces out there. They're too valuable unless they're encapsulated.
Yes. So if you're putting the documents in the folder with the paper in between, yeah. Well, it depends on how you store it, where your storage environment is. There's a lot of factors. What we're trying to do now is to arrest the acidification. That was what's important. And like I say, once again, I will get into this more this afternoon. That's what we're trying to do. You can never go back and fix it, but you can halt that process where it turns brittle and brown.
So you say this is your temporary process. No, this is a long-term process for us. What we do is we deacidify. Encapsulation is—deacidification and encapsulation is an expensive process. This one, like I say, I wanted to get into this this afternoon, but this one can here, $35. You're talking maybe, maybe if you're lucky, 40 documents. And then you've got your mylar for encapsulation. You've got the tape, the time, the time, the personnel.
And once you've encapsulated those 40 documents, you've spent $100, maybe. But those things are now permanently protected. Yes. But do you have—I've got 50,000 pieces of paper in my archives for the area. Admittedly, 85 percent of those are copies. But for those 15 percent, I don't have the money in my budget to encapsulate every piece. Only the ones that we want to put in our traveling exhibit for show.
So what we do is we deacidify. We put—we take a folder, we take a folder, we deacidify the piece. We use gloves after you've used it, and I'll talk more this afternoon. Put the piece in. You put a piece of buffered interleaving paper in it. You put your next piece down. You put a piece of buffered interleaving paper. So you get like five, six, however many documents you've got.
[00:25:00]
Close the pack up. Goes in an acid-free Pentaflex folder inside of an acid-free stack box. It's now protected from the environment at least better than it was just sitting in one of these old non-acid-free folders, which are causing damage to these pieces as we speak. Okay? Does that make sense? It is—it's not the best long term, but it's the most economical and cost-effective for us. So we're making our best effort using a short-term process in terms of what we're doing better than not doing anything.
That's the quickest way. Yes, but what you're doing is also acceptable, but you have to understand. Am I doing this for today? Or am I doing this for 50 or 100 years from today? Alcoholics Anonymous is what, 66 years? 67 years? Okay. We have stuff from 67 years ago, which is preserved today. Do we want that to be around for another 67 years? Yeah. You have to weigh a lot of factors in what you do in this process.
Bob has been doing this for a long time. He has a good budget. I've been doing it for a short time, and I've only got a halfway budget, you know, and I can only spend so much money in my area. So we try and do the best that we can. We asked our area for additional funds for three years to do our deacidification process, and that was a thousand dollars a year for three years. We normally get $500. We're coming to the end of our three-year process.
We're only a quarter of the way done. Okay. Say you've got this document that you want to show to people that are working in your archive room. This is the easiest and quickest way for you to, once you've preserved that piece, to show it to people. This is not a long-term situation. There's three sides that are open to the environment. All this does is this allows you, without having to put a pair of gloves on, to show that document.
That's why we wanted to show this to you. It's just a temporary— It's a fast way to do that. If you had, say you had something you wanted to bring out to show someone out of your stack room, you could put it in one of these filly folders. They could take a look at this. They could write down the information. And then they could, you could take it and put it back in, into your stack box. Just the one side.
You'll see it when it comes around. No, no, that's the piece we've been working on all morning. Yeah. Yeah, once, once I'll go— Yes. I'll go through that later, more this afternoon. Yes. What is the general life of a sheet of paper that's not—? Ooh. That all depends on the environment. Is it linen? Is it cotton? Is it rag? What kind of paper is it? Was it kept in a garage? Yeah. Where carbon dioxide's in the air, you know, things like that.
I'm dealing with papers—I'm the archivist for my city. I'm dealing with papers that were in a sea trunk for a hundred years, and they look as good—and they're dated 1855 to 1895. They are good paper, for one, but they look like they were written on yesterday, because they've been kept in a closed environment. Once I take these out, I've been—I worked constantly, nonstop for almost three weeks to deacidify and encapsulate every one of those documents, because now they're out into the environment.
So now they're going to stay looking that good, I think they're saying now 150 years, I think. If I deacidify a letter for you, and within the next 150, 200 years something looks like there's acid in it, you come back and tell me and we'll look at it. That's what the science of the day is telling us. A letter that someone would want to file within a file. Okay. Original letter. Okay. Yes. If, if it had—how old is the document?
Brand new. A brand new document. How long will it last? How valuable is it? I'm just thinking of people who just put things in spots, and… The paper today is pretty good. The paper today is pretty good. Okay, and I'll talk. The paper today does not use a quarter of the acid process
[00:30:03]
that they used years ago. It's good stuff. Unless you buy the real cheap bond, like Office Depot, whatever. You want to use a good bond paper if you're going to be doing… And Bob stresses acid-free for your copy. We use acid-free on our copies. We take an original piece, we make a copy of it. We take and we put that piece away. We now have a reference of that original piece. I now have a copy that I can make a copy and a copy and a copy and a copy and a copy and a copy of, and that I can show to you. Because what's important about the piece that you're preserving?
You're preserving the historical content of the paper. But you also want it to, as archivists, it doesn't do you any good to preserve this stuff and lock it away, because then no one else gets a chance to see it. So what do you do? You share that information with anyone else. That's, as archivists, that's what we do. We share the information. We preserve and we share the information from the past. So you share the copy. Okay.
I know you do. Approximately, I would say yes. But if you want to wait and you want to say, Oh, well, I'll let Joe Schmo 50 years down the line deal with this document. What's the quickest way you can do something with that document if you had the equipment? Other than that, we don't have this. What's the quickest way you could do it? Acid-free bond, run it through a copy machine and put the original and put it in the file.
Yes. And we do that. We keep the original, we respect it, and yes. Aaron, you guys are doing scanning at GSO, aren't you? Is she not here? Okay. I think GSO is going through a scanning process. A scanner, a copier, all use high-intensity light. Light is one of our enemies. Light, water, heat, those are all our enemies, okay? Paper is still the best medium to preserve information to date. It's not tape. It's not CDs.
It's paper. What General Service Office is scanning now are the, correct me if I'm wrong, I think they're still into that project. They are doing the Bill Wilson, the Dr. Bob Smith, and the Bill Dotson, and the Dr. Silkworth, all of those letters that were really fragmented and deteriorated. They have scanned them so that we can go ahead and at least not lose the material. Scanning is a good process, yes.
But that's awfully high intensity. If you want to scan it once so that you can then disseminate that information through your disk or through your electronic media, yes. But don't scan it and then go scan it again and then go scan it again. Same with copying. Don't copy it once, Oh gee, I need ten copies. Let's make ten copies from the original. You're going to get that bright light hitting that document, and it, I don't know exactly what the formula for the degradation of paper is with the high xenon lamps that they use, but it is quite intense.
Hold it up right there. Let's just say that we have a heavily used document. I don't know what that document would be. Let's just, for practical purposes, we have a letter. We use a lot of copies of it. Whenever we do that, and we don't have that many, but we do have a few, we will take and we will make three copies of that letter. One of those copies is treated and retained almost as priceless as the original. We take those other two copies, and it's a little petition with acid-free tissue, and we put them in the back.
Only one of those copies is used for other copies. Sooner or later, sooner or later, that copy will be no good. We will take the second copy and make a couple more. We never recopy the original, if at all possible. Okay. Yes.
[00:35:03]
Sure you could. Sure. Sure, absolutely. That causes less damage to the original. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, it depends on how good your original copy is. You know, if you have a real cruddy copy, you're going to want to use your original. It depends. There's a few variables. How good is your original? Is it going to give you—does it give you a good copy? If it doesn't give you a good copy, obviously your next copy is not going to be that good. You know, I used to work for Kinko's.
A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy looks really, really bad. Okay? But, so, but use it very sparingly on the original, as sparingly as you can. I know of some people that have used and made a lot of copies from their originals. They're now as light as some of the mimeographs that you see out there, those purple mimeographs. They're very, very light, and they've been damaged. And of course, about, I get the original, preserve, and make copies of them.
Is it possible to scan it so that we do want to retain it? Well, you can, but why would you do that? Scan it once, put it to disk, and then just share your disk with someone. That's the easiest way to use a scanner. Yes. I'm a former lighting engineer. While I don't have any data, my question is, do scanners have much light intensity? They are. Yeah, that's correct. They use a less intense light. I say that strictly, I have never smelled ozone from a scanner. Yeah. I smell it from a copy machine all the time, and not as bad as it used to be. Well, copiers create ozone.
There's a little thin wire inside that has an electromagnetic charge on it, and as it's going through and making that copy, it creates an electric charge through that wire, a charging wire in there, and that creates ozone. That's what you're smelling probably. I don't think the ozone is coming off your original document. I think it's in the guts of the copier stuff. That's a clear indication of ionization there.
Yes. If you're ionizing air, you're also ionizing… Well, yes, whatever around it, absolutely. Good point. Good point. Yes. If I have used that folder as a quick storage, and I've got folders and I've got the material, and I'm excited to see this different way to do this file started. If I've used it and cleaned the material, but I have not de-axed, now can I take that out, work on that sheet? Is that folder any good, or is there an acid migration into that folder?
Was it an acid-free folder? Yeah, was it a buffered acid-free folder? Yeah, I think it is, because it came from… Buffered, yes. Will it send it back on to the next item that I… I mean, that's really stretching. Negligible. But it could. I always use the word buffered, like buffered acid-free bond, buffered acid-free folder. What that means, for those that don't understand, is helps from that for acid transfer.
Well, I'll explain more about that this afternoon too, yes. One last question I have to do with scanning and all. One thing that I can see, in some cases, when you have a very badly deteriorated item that you are scanning, it is possible, for clarity of the information on the document, that you can go in and touch it up for some… Yes. That's why I already talked about that as part of General Service Office's concern, because they're enhancing those original letters up at GSO, and that's why they elected to do that. Judith is doing a great job in that area, and a lot of it is done already. Yes.
Is there any information as to the least destructive form of lighting in a display room? I don't see any neon lights, okay? I've got a lot of them in my display room. I have them in my stack room. You mean fluorescent? Fluorescent, whatever you want to call them. And back here on the table is the catalogs, and you can buy tubes which will screen out the UV. Ultraviolet light is the enemy and the lighting source.
So do they make UV— It's a UV filter, yes. You can put it right over your tube, and it'll screen out 90 percent of the ultraviolet light. We use those in our archives. Second question has to do with laser copies for color. A couple books, when I came into the display, there was a display room in which all these old interesting alcoholic books, like Marty Mann's books, stuff like that, were just displayed
[00:40:02]
in the window out to the common room, and they were getting really faded. And so I talked one of the guys into at least laser copying a few and taking some of them out. You can laser copy the covers so that they look like they're— Have any of you have photographs that you put on your wall where the sunlight might get them? What's happened to your photographs? Especially color photographs. A good way to do that is when you go home, when this is over with, take a newspaper. Do you have a room where the sun is in there all the time? And if you don't have any kitty cats, you can get away with that. I have kitty cats, so I can't.
You can lay that newspaper on the floor where the sun's on it every day. It doesn't make a difference whether it's a whole big newspaper or one sheet. And just let it stay there. Leave it there for a week and watch what happens. Take a piece of anything and cover over half of that newspaper to prevent the sun from getting in. When I do some things for our displays, I will artificially age materials for effect for display.
I can use it in one of two ways, and at sun lamps, because I also do a lot of cleaning of pictures and prints and things like that. Those lamps are very, very strong, but I guarantee you, no time at all, they will put a hurt on that piece of paper. It's not anything valuable. It's a throwaway almost. The second thing that I've done to actually make a much better display is, is I will age it. I will dip it in a solution of tea.
Not full strength, but I will dip it in tea, and it makes it look like it's 50 years old to 100 years old. A lot of the old-timers, and this is the reason I do that, a lot of the old-timers come in, they like to see old things. They don't. We have a place in Little Rock called the Yes Group, Youth Enjoying Sobriety, and all their stuff is nice and new and neat and pretty and everything. And when the old-timers go down there, they don't spend much time looking at the material.
But then you hand them some of this material, and all of a sudden it sparks their interest. Yeah. Yeah, we need to move on to repair paper. We'll have to be done by noon. We need to do repair torn paper. Yeah, we've got to move on to another section here, but we're going to have plenty of time today for all your questions, okay? Hopefully most of them will be answered by this afternoon. Get the iron plugged in. Here's a good one right here.
Do you recommend any book? There are books out there, yes. Do you recommend them? How can we do this? Yeah. My mind shut down in that respect. There are some books. There's only really two that you need that I use, and in fact I use it to teach a course, and they're wonderful. If you will take, and I'll give you the information later, I'll give you the names of those two books. Again, I had to keep my weight limit down.
By the way, any bags, and I come to find out, I've got a friend who's in that career now, and any bag that approaches 50 pounds or more, I guarantee it gets checked. So keep it under 50, like 45 or less. And I did not want to bring the books with me. One of the things I can recommend for you, sir, Gaylord puts out what's called a Pathfinder series. It's a free publication, set of five pamphlets. Talks about paper, textile, photographic, and basic archival things.
If you call 1-800-GAYLORD, or I think it's www.gaylord.com, and ask them for their—they'll send you a free catalog. And I know you can get, you can ask for this Pathfinder series, and it's free, and they'll mail it right to you. I've got one in my archives, and I refer to it often, and it's got—they're nice little pamphlets, and they tell you a lot of things, and there's extended reading in every one of those pamphlets.
I know that they'll let you know some of the best books that are out there. Okay. I do too. Very good book. That's the best in its field. Conservation of photographs, yes. The best in its field. Bob, what setting do you want this iron on? Okay. What setting do you want the iron on? Do we have any burning, burning, burning question? Because we've got to move on. Any new question? New, different people?
A new question. Different people have asked questions. No. GE.
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They make them. Seriously, if you do irons, make them absolutely smooth. No steam iron. You can also buy what's called a tacking iron. A tacking iron will also work too. Here's a cord right here. I've got it plugged in. What I've got? No. I hadn't even done anything with it yet. Hold on, Darcy. Hold on. You're way ahead of me. I promise I'll stop him before he does anything real bad. Maybe it's something new. You make it stronger, I don't know.
That's a good question. What she mentioned was, is I clearly picked up a piece of wax paper and I put it down and I put a letter on it. I have actually repaired books. And what I do is I put little pieces of wax paper in there, and after I get the repair done, I will iron them dry. And the reason I put the wax paper in there is so it won't glue the pages together. If you iron it with that piece of wax paper in there, you'll get the prettiest, messiest brownish stain you ever want to see.
Do not put heat anywhere around that wax. But if you're going to do it, do it on something old because you probably will do it the first time. I seriously doubt you will do it the second time. You know, just like the president said the other day, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Anyway, that's what it is. Yeah, that's right, he did. He got all confused and twisted around and everything.
Where's the Japanese paper? I got it right here. Do you want to do tape first? No. Got set up right here. There is several types of paper that can be used, and they're all very, very valuable. But you only need about four: mulberry, kitakata, sekishu, and the mulberry can be either bleached or unbleached. Mulberry is the most… Then that way you got a pure white and a…