The History Channel explores Life After People

The History Channel has recently aired Life After People , an exploration of what would happen to the Earth if all humans suddenly left. There is no comment on why or what happened to the people; no stories of disasters, wars, or disease. It is as if they left home and never returned.

The two-hour show outlines what would happen in the first hours, days, weeks, and months, finally taking year increments - 10 years, 20 years, ... 150 years, 200 years, etc. The show discusses how quickly our modern conveniences, like electricity, would fail without human maintenance, contemplates the fate of family pets, and demonstrates how plants would overtake our industrial centers.

As Mother Nature and the ravages of time wear on, viewers are left to contemplate what would be left of the human legacy. Images of the Lincoln Memorial looking much like a forgotten Mayan ruin flash before us. We are left to consider how permanent our structures are and in what form our historical record will survive -- if it will survive.

We often envisage that we will have more to leave behind than our ancient ancestors. Surely archaeologists in the future will have more to go on than we have with pictures on buildings and inscriptions in stone. Even buildings crumble without maintenance in harsh climates. Just how permanent is our legacy? Books and acetate film are specifically considered. Without humans to implement and maintain the climate controls at places like the Getty Institute, these temporary vessels of our knowledge and experience are left to warp, mold, and be reduced to nothing. Our digital items are also not so long lasting, even before considering the availability of playback systems.

Preservation is a constant maintenance task. Time and nature are not our best friends. Therefore it is crucial to consider how important people -- preservation librarians, archivists, etc. -- are to making sure our legacy is saved. These items will not last on their own.

You have to wear the gloves

In the last post I mentioned that getting closer to your ideal preservation conditions and processes involves one step at a time and suggested buying white gloves as a first inexpensive step to dealing with your items, such as photographs or slides. The second step is, obviously enough, that you have to wear the gloves.

This may seem to simple, but it's often the harder part of taking that first step. Not wearing the gloves is like starting an exercise program by buying the gym membership and then never going. It's easy to do, but not very effective and won't get you any closer to your goals. Get into the habit. Set an example for your staff by wearing the gloves when you work with the items. Create a habit. Let's say working with the photographs is something you only do once a week. Instead, try to make a schedule to work with the photographs every day for an hour (if you don't already) and make sure you wear the gloves as part of your ritual.

Still resisting? Perhaps there is something else going on. The gloves aren't the right size. Or you need to use lotion after wearing them for a while. See if there are other problems that can be resolved so that you can master this step. Maybe white gloves were not the place to start. The whole point of the previous post was to start somewhere, not to boost glove sales; the whole point of this post is that once you do start, follow through. Wear your gloves - whatever form they take.

Preservation is Compromise

We would all like to have the best equipment, the best space, the ideal climate conditions for our collections, but sometimes it's just not feasible. This isn't about giving up altogether, or complaining about the library world, being underfunding, the lack of professionalism, etc. It's about realizing that these compromises and priority-making are a part of the work. It is what makes librarianship, museum curation, and preservation a challenging job - one that should require a masters degree to do.

Celebrate the small victories, and move forward even if you don't think you're "at that stage yet." For example, buying gloves for handling photographs. The gloves are inexpensive and a good place to make one small step forward. The environment may not be the cleanest, many of the photographs may already be dusty, water damaged, ripped and bent, and you may not be putting them into the proper archival boxes right away, however, it's a start. Donning the gloves is a constant reminder of how the space is supposed to be a clean area. It will get you into the mindset to make other small changes and decisions.

It may also open your eyes to the long way you have to go to get to your ideal preservation set up, but don't let it overwhelm you. Next month, maybe you'll be able to ensure you have a few of those archival boxes.

Digital preservation?

Preservation is Access
Digitization is Access
Therefore...

Now, wait a minute. Digitization is not preservation. It's not clear why many people think this way, but digitization does not save everything.

The National Museum of American History has been closed since 2006 and will not reopen until summer 2008. During this time, The Treasures of American History, which includes Dorothy's Ruby Red Slippers from The Wizard of Oz, as well as Archie Bunker's chair from All in the Family, will be housed at the National Air and Space Museum. This summer, there happened to be an event in that area of the NASM on one particular day and the Treasures of American History exhibit was closed until 2:3o p.m. At 3:00 p.m., the doors finally opened to the public and a burst of people rushed it. There were numerous 8-12 year-olds with cameras who practically ran from exhibit to exhibit taking quick snapshots of each of the items.

As I stood looking at a large table with lots of small squares of colors and read the description, I realized that it was decorated with detailed inlaid wood, not merely painted, as I first thought. A young girl slipped alongside me, snapped a picture and left, not pausing for a second. I'm sure she had less time than originally planned since the exhibit was open for a third of the time on that particular day, but I wonder how much she really got out of the exhibit. When she gets home will she look at the pictures? Will she realize the stories behind them or the detail that went into them? Will she be able to walk around the pieces and realize how they are put together? Finally, why did she come to the museum in the first place? The Ruby Red Slippers are online here.

And here's the table.
Don't you wish you could see it close up?

Three Ring Binders for Slides

Three-ring binders can be so helpful in organizing things that they even make three-ring binders with pockets for slides and photographs. Have you ever tried to organize slides with three-ring binders? There are several pros and cons to doing so.

First the pros...

• There are many labeling options. You can label an entire page as well as each slide. Labeling can be done on the slide or on the pockets or both. You can insert scraps of paper with additional metadata in one of the pockets (instead of a slide). You can also add pieces of paper in the binder with additional explanation, e.g. an explanation of abbreviations used on the slides, organization information, numbering techniques, general information about the entire collection, etc.
• The sheets are easy to remove as a whole sheet and clear pockets allow for viewing several slides at once by holding up to a light or putting against a light table.
• If the slides have a specific order (e.g. a presentation), is easier to keep them properly arranged since you are only ordering several pages, instead of tens or hundreds of slides.
  
• It is easier to compare duplicates or similar slides if you can hold about 20 of them at once.
• It can be easy to expand a slide collection located in a binder since you would just need to add an additional page.
  
• These type of slide covers keep most dust and bugs off of the image.
• As long as the slides are kept out of high humidity, they are relatively safe from mold in these slide pockets.
• As long as you pay attention to the type of material the slide pockets are made out of, it is a recommended preservation options by Wilhelm Imaging Research
  

And the cons...

• Like any physical holder, you must make a determination of how you will handle placement. Putting only slides from one designation on a page may be helpful (e.g. from one event, of one person, of one botanical species, etc.).
• Binders can take a lot of room. If you are placing only slides from one event/person/place, etc. on a page, you may have many pages that are not full. This adds to the bulk of a collection that could be very efficiently stored (but not as easily accessed) in boxes or some other fashion.
• Binders can still make expansion difficult. Sometimes it is unreasonable to put one type of slide on a page, e.g. when there are typically less than 10 of one type or quite often only 2-3 of one type. In this case, it is necessary to combine types on pages. If new slides need to fit between these types, it might be time consuming to fit them in. It also limits the amount of permanent writing you would be able to do on the slide pockets -- as slides may be moving to different pockets over the course of time.
  
• Binders tend to get top heavy. Because those putting together the collection is most likely to start storing slides at the upper-left-most part of the page, the right side and bottom of each slide pocket sheet may not be filled. After 50-100 pages, there is a noticeable bulge at the top of the binder -- much like a stack of stapled packets.
• The slide pockets can also be clingy and static-y. Information marked with pencil may rub off the slide and onto the pocket. Depending on where the markings were, the pencil marks could dirty up the entire pocket making it hard to see the slides through. It can also cause difficulty in reading information on the slide -- as not only the slide will be smudged, but the additional graphite will obscure even new slides with permanent writing.
• Some of these three-hole slide pockets aren't as clear and easy to see through as others. And some don't wear as well as others. It's worth investigating some options before investing in this type of organization for your collection.

Minimizing the cons...

• You can minimize most of the cons with careful planning, especially in how you will label images. Keeping most of the labeling on each slide is always helpful to allow moving the slides to different pockets or pages, and guard against losing slides that may be taken out of the binder during use.
• If you have an expanding collection, planning carefully the spacing between current slides in the collection and how additional slides will be added can avoid headaches later. Both keeping space on each page of slide pockets and space in each binder for additional pages can help.
  
• Another option to minimize the headaches of an expanding collection is using cross reference stickers to direct users to separate binders with later additions to the collection.
  
• Using smaller binders (e.g. 1 to 1.5 inch binders instead of 4 or 6 inch binders) can minimize the problem of top heavy binders. While it may mean more binders, they are easier to handle. If they are labeled well, they will be easy to organize. In addition, in a heavily used collection, more people will be able to simultaneously use different parts of the collection than if all the slides were in only one or two binders.
  

How have you organized slides or seen them organized? What are some issues you've seen with slides in binders or how have you minimized some of these problems?

Abbreviations in Metadata

Acronyms and abbreviations are very helpful especially in the case of having metadata on small object such as slides. While you can have a catalog pointing to the object's location, the slide itself still needs to be labeled so that it can be organized. Slides have a limited amount of space on them, and while you can attach papers to them, or put papers next to them in a slide binder or box, eventually the paper and slide will get separated. For a slide to be viewed it must be able to stand alone.

It is, therefore, important to have certain basic information on the slide itself. The most obvious information is what's in the picture. However, even if the picture is self-explanatory, -- e.g. taken in a zoo, with the zebra sign in the foreground and a zebra in the background -- it's only labeled as to what it is, not its context within the collection. For example, without a categorization number or some sort of accession number, how would we differentiate it from other zebra images? How would we shelve it or organize it? And how would we find it again, in a book or box of other slides?

Besides having some basic information of what is in the picture, an accession number and a classification designation will also be needed. If the slide as been added to a digital database, it probably has an additional reference number for that. Some slides may also have a year and a photographer and a location note. All very helpful in case a database, catalog, or other metadata tool is lost, outdated or corrupted.

Think about what this slide might now look like. Let's take an example slide of a flower. Numbers 8983, 1990, and 02-2156 appear on the slide. Letter-type writing included: Lily F., Aletris lutea, L12, and FL. On the back was a stamp of a photographer. Confused? I was too. In fact, I had seen a slide similar to this and assumed the Lily F. refered to a photographer -- which unfortunately was different than the photographer mentioned on the back. Not until looking at several similar slides and then seeing one labeled Rose F. in the same way, did I realize that the F. stood for "family" (as in belonging to the Lily Family and the Rose Family) not a last name. Most of the slides in this collection had the scientific names Liliaceae and Rosaceae. This deviation was confusing. It made me think twice about the types of abbreviations on slides and their consistency.

While just having all the relevant information on the slide is helpful, it is not always enough. The best scenario would be to label each piece of metadata, e.g. accession: xxxx, photographer: xxx, year: xxx, location: xxx, etc. On a slide, with little space, however, that is not feasible. Sometimes it's a challenge to fit the scientific name alone!

Tips to cut the confusion

• A consistent location on the slide can be helpful. If the accession number is always in the bottom left, it will be easier to identify. The family name can always appear on the left side. And so on.
  
• Abbreviations can help. If the accession number always begins with an A, or the year always begins with a Y, it might make it clearer what each piece of information is.
• Formatting can also be a clue. The 2-digit-hyphen-4-digit accession number, if always formatted that way, can be a clue. Consciously selecting special formats for different information types can be a helpful clue.
  
• Finally, having a table to cross reference abbreviations is also necessary. BBNP is a much more helpful location note than TX because it designates Big Bend National Park -- which gives a specific part of TX, a specific city, and perhaps almost geographic coordinates. It's not as obvious as TX = Texas, however, and without a cross reference, may be less helpful in the long run if it can never be decoded.

Metadata is important in preservation, because if there is no information about when, where, or what the image is of, it is almost as if we were unable to preserve the image in the first place.

If we are...

• unable to organize it and give it a place in the collection
• unable to talk about it in relation to the work it was intended for (e.g. botanical images intended for botanical research)
• unable talk about how old it is, who made it, where it was made, or put it into a historical context
  

...then we have not been stewards of the item. We cannot provide adequate access to it. And we have not preserved it.


Have you had to do a bit of decoding in your work to determine what something is, how old it is, or other information about it? Were you able to discover the "answer" you were looking for? What additional tools may have been helpful in your quest?

Be My Preserved Valentine

Ah, Valentine's Day. What Valentines cards do you remember from your past? Valentines with Precious Moments figures, Snoopy characters, or your favorite comics? How about those cute (cheesy?) cards with sayings such as "we make a great pair" and a drawing of a pair of socks? Perhaps you remember your first valentine from your first crush.

Old Valentines
You may treasure valentines from your sweetheart and keep them tucked away in a "safe spot," but Katherine Kreider looks at valentines throughout the ages. Not just Valentine's Day cards, but also toys, advertising, and other ephemera. Her three books show photographs and descriptions of Valentine's Day items throughout the ages from the 1800s to the late twentieth century.

Back here in the twenty-first century, many of you are wondering about Valentine's Day 2007. Whether for friends or that special someone, those of you looking for an antique Valentine, Kingsbury Antiques, Krieder's store in Pennsylvania, sells them. For e-cards, you can find vintage valentine clip art on About.com.

Storing Your Valentines
Others may be wondering how best to store their personal collection of old valentines. If you have something of high sentimental value, rare or very old, consult a professional conservator. Otherwise, you can use these general guidelines for some minimal preservation you can do at home.

Treat valentines like you would other paper materials you want to preserve. They are best kept protected - in an envelope or box. They should not be bent, folded unnecessarily (original folds are okay), or rolled to fit a certain space. Lie flat in a box with like sizes together, largest valentines on the bottom, smaller on the top, to prevent bending. Valentines you suspect are made with acidic papers should be separated from the rest. Minimal preservation on these can include interleaving with alkaline paper (most printer paper is alkaline or non-acidic, check the packaging and just put a sheet between each valentine during storage). You may want to change the alkaline paper every few years.

Make sure you label your box or envelope with enough detail so someone knows what it is (and knows not to discard it). Keep it in a cool dry place -- avoid bathrooms, laundry rooms, basements, and attics. Take a look at your valentines. If they were created or signed with an acidic pen, the writing may have faded. If this occurs, it is likely the writing could fade completely. You may wish to take a picture of the valentine before your sweethearts sweet nothings fade to... nothing. Consult a professional for items with mold or other options for acidity.

Valentines can also involve materials other than paper. Cloth or metals may be attached, the item might be a toy or stuffed animal. Consider that cloth and other materials all have different preservation techniques.

Creating Valentines that Last
What if you're creating a special valentine this year for your special someone? What precautions can you take in making the card that will help along the preservation path? Use acid free paper and pens/markers. Make sure your glue or paste is acid free. You can even make your own paste. The Northeast Document Conservation Center has a couple of
easy recipes to follow.

Acid-free materials are important because acidic ink will fade over time and acidic paper will become brittle. Any vibrant colors of acidic papers will fade, and anything touching your card that is acidic can "bleed" its pH level onto your valentine. Even the envelope should be acid-free.

Have a lovely Valentine's Day!