Category: Preservation and Digitization

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Preservation Week at Emory Libraries 

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April 25 through May 1 is Preservation Week. An initiative of the American Library Association-Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALA-ALCTS), Preservation Week is a time when institutions across the country highlight at-risk collections and share knowledge about the work of caring for these collections and making them accessible. At Emory Libraries, activities currently underway or recently completed by Preservation and Digitization Services include:  annual updating of emergency preparedness and disaster response documents for all Emory University Libraries and the Library Service Center  removing Read More …

From Art Studio to Digitization

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When the call went out from Emory Libraries to work remotely due to COVID-19, I took home my computer and a flatbed scanner, the one normally used for scanning book foldouts. Here at home, this scanner has become my only tool for digitizing all types of books. Although I miss the speed of our higher-quality Read More …

Adapting Through Adversity: Keeping Productive (and Sane) During COVID-19

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2020 has been anything but normal. Entering the eleventh week of work from home and social distancing practices, we have all experienced impacts to our lives, both professionally and personally. It is very easy to become overwhelmed by the growing uncertainty and conflicting reports about our world returning to some form of stability. At Emory Read More …

Building A Home Digitization Station

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How are we continuing to digitize Emory Libraries audiovisual material during COVID-19? By building a home digitization station, of course!  Although our audio and video digitization workstations have many parts, their core components are actually quite portable. Taking cues from resources in the moving image archives community (in particular, Ashley Blewer’s Minimum Viable Station and Read More …

Monitoring Library Collections Remotely

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The staff of the Emory Libraries Conservation Lab is working remotely right now, but we still need to keep track of the environmental conditions in our important library collections spaces. During COVID-19 social distancing and remote work conditions, we no longer have direct access to our onsite data loggers, so we had to find creative Read More …

Conservation in the Age of COVID-19

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My average work day as an assistant conservator for Emory Libraries is spent primarily at the bench, performing conservation treatment on special collections materials. So, what have these first weeks of working from home looked like for me? I brought home my work laptop and completed several crash courses on using Zoom and working remotely. Read More …

Bed sheets, boot laces, coffee, floor wax, and toilet paper: Incarcerated artists’ books exhibition poses unusual conservation challenges

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Voices From the Other Side is a student-curated exhibition of artists’ books and writings from Rose Library’s Phillips State Prison Book Project Records on view now on Level 1 of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Many of these artists’ books were created by students in Bill Taft’s creative non-fiction classes, taught under the auspices of Read More …

From the Conservation Lab: Using Gels to Remove Stains from the “Oratio in die Omnium Sanctorum” (1483)

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The Oratio in die Omnium Sanctorum is a series of sermons written for All Saint’s Day by Thomas de Capitaneis. From the Pitts Theology Library incunabula collection, it is a small pamphlet printed in 1483 with simple paper covers. The pamphlet appears to have been partially submerged in liquid and allowed to dry. As the Read More …

Rescuing Moldy Photographs

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  In April, the Preservation Office of Emory Libraries received photographic items to be treated for mold from the African American Collection of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. These photographs included sixteen studio prints, four tintypes, three ambrotypes, and two larger convex photographs. Mold covered the images due to moisture Read More …

Updating the Emory Libraries Conservation Lab

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In 1990, the Emory Libraries Conservation Lab occupied a modest footprint of space. It was one-third the size of our current lab, which limited the treatment possibilities. Eight years later, construction of a larger lab expanded the overall space and the conservation work. After twenty years, our lab has been updated and refreshed again. Conservation Read More …