Hello! How time flies when a library building is undergoing renovations. We’re overdue for an update on what the Preservation Unit at the University of Arkansas Libraries has been up to, so let’s go!
The Mullins Library construction continues, which means we’re still working from our temporary locations. We took a hard hat tour of the building in May and saw how things were progressing.
Sally and Amber were busy with treatments and repairs in FY24. Many music scores were sewn and many book spines were repaired! A total of 662 volumes were treated/repaired.
We* created a poster for the ArLA (Arkansas Library Association) meeting in October 2023. Titled “Never Gonna Pack These (Collections) Up Without Preservation,” it reviews the timeline for packing Special Collections items in 2022 and highlights the categories of planning, packing prep, logistics, oversize materials, and unexpected events. Although the project was serious business, we wanted to make the poster lighthearted with pop-culture adjacent references.
*Along with Estefani Mann, who cross-trained with Preservation in 2022; she was instrumental in generating both packing strategies and poster content.
Sally and Estefani presented the poster at the conference, and then presented about the presentation at the conference in a Libraries All-Staff meeting (very meta).
Sally drew this box packing guide to show how to appropriately pack a records box with preservation in mind.
Besides treating books, a variety of enclosures have been created for a variety of materials–posters, film reels, an artist’s book, and objects. Items that were dusty/dirty and that contained dead pests were dry cleaned or vacuumed. We also prepared a condition report on a dress that was loaned for an exhibit; this entailed a thorough review of all aspects of the dress (so many beads!) which was then written up and documented with photographs. We can now refer back to the report if the dress is loaned again in the future.
We hosted book and paper repair workshops for Libraries staff in the summer of 2023 and 2024. Each workshop was three hours long and participants had the opportunity to do hands-on repair work with books (repairing corners and spines, making pulp paper) and paper (repairing tears with tissue and paste, washing). In 2024, everyone created their own notebooks, which meant they experienced sewing pages and pasting on a cover.
Educating staff on book and paper repair has been fun and enlightening for everyone! We get to brush up on our teaching skills and staff get to learn and do things they aren’t typically exposed to in their daily tasks. To date we’ve had 38 people participate in a workshop and we’re looking forward to hosting more staff members in the future.
Preservation Unit staff completed the Safe Zone Allies two-hour training course in October 2023 through the University of Arkansas Center for Multicultural and Diversity Education. Safe Zone Allies are members of the University of Arkansas who believe that all students and people in the campus community should be treated equally and fairly regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Mary participated in several conferences in the last year. In November 2023, Mary, Katrina Windon, and Emily Ward of Special Collections presented “Iteratively Building a Film and Video Preservation Program” at the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Conference. In May 2024, she presented “The Collections Won’t Pack Themselves” at the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) Annual Meeting. As a member and co-chair of the Core Preservation Outreach Committee, in June 2023 & 2024, she helped to facilitate and work at the full-day Preservation in Action event at the American Library Association’s Annual Meeting.
If you made it this far, thanks for catching up with us! In the meantime we’re starting to plan for the return to the renovated library and the unpacking process and all that entails… it’ll be just like 2022, but in reverse!