UA librarians find themselves in a sticky situation

A seminar in the Main Library yesterday demonstrated to 25 book aficionados a number of ways to protect and preserve books. Thomas Clareson, a preservation manager for Amigos Bibliographic Council, described what happens when library users abuse books.

"Students should understand the idea that what they think of as casual damage (to a book) can cause a lot of work for someone," Clareson said. "Keeping these books in good condition is important so future generations of students can use them."

The seminar detailed book cleaning and repairing techniques, including mending torn paper and reinserting pages that have fallen out. Participants were also taught how to make protective bindings for older volumes.

"We show people how to keep material alive longer," Clareson said.

Meryn Finity, a library specialist for Arizona State Museum, said she organized the seminar to give southern Arizona library staffers an opportunity to learn how to maintain a library collection.

"I just always like to learn new techniques and the most current technologies and I like to spread them to as many people as possible," Finity said.

She invited speakers from the Dallas-based Amigos Bibliographic Council to host the seminar. The group of 25 library staffers, including 12 from the UA, met all day yesterday and will continue today.

"I organized it because there hasn't been any training for book preservation and conservation in southern Arizona for many years," Finity said. "The most striking thing was that so many people were interested and the class filled up so quickly."

Finity, who repairs books for Arizona State Museum, said there are 50,000 texts at the museum that need to be preserved. The books range from rare and unique 19th century works to contemporary archeological field reports, she said.

The stop at the University of Arizona is one of many for the Amigos Preservation Service, which provides textual preservation support and information to librarians throughout the Southwest. The nonprofit program was established in 1991 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The seminar offered tips on correcting everyday and unusual problems - ranging from mundane pencil marks to stubborn gum wads.

Kenneth Lavender, a library curator for the University of North Texas, explained the procedure for removing gum from book pages. He said sticky books should be wrapped in wax paper and put in the freezer for about two days. After two days the gum is usually hard enough for a librarian to scrape it off with a tiny spatula.

Lavender and Clareson shared tales of what they have come across during their careers as book preservationists. Lavender said he found a lock of golden hair in a Civil War military manual.

Chewed and unchewed gum, flies squished between book pages and bananas were all uncovered.

The large number of texts printed with acidic inks, which are problematic to preserve, pose a considerable obstacle to library curators, Lavender said. He explained that high acid content on a printed page increases the susceptibility to decomposition.

Many works between 1850 and 1950, including Charles Dickens books and those by early science fiction writers like Jules Verne, were printed on acidic paper, Lavender said

"At the University of Northern Texas, we have (more than) 400,000 novels from this period that need immediate attention," he said.

Dickens' stories, for example, were each broken down into many sections and sold in magazine installments, Lavender said.

While the stories themselves have obviously survived, the magazine covers and advertisements contained within the stories - which tell a great deal about the society of that period - have disintegrated, he said.

The seminar is for library professionals, and is closed to the public.

Michael Lafleur can be reached via e-mail at Michael.Lafleur@wildcat.arizona.edu.