Thursday, February 2, 2012
LIBRARY DAY IN THE LIFE, THURSDAY
I meant to mention that in last night’s class, I also told everyone that my goal in the program is to do at least one assignment in every class related to dogs.
Today, my library day consisted of work at my preservation internship. First, I helped unpack some boxes of books and journals from the commercial bindery. I matched the books to their dust jackets and information slips with barcode stickers.
Then I got to use a stapling machine to attach some booklets of sheet music to protective covers. First, I removed an extraneous adhesive flap in the center of the covers with a very sharp blade.
Then, I used the nifty stapling machine to attach the booklets to the covers.
I spent the rest of the time doing research on books pulled as “brittle books.” The process involves looking over the books and recording types of damage (markings, torn pages, missing pages, etc.). I also do a double fold test, which involves folding a small bit of a corner of a page back and forth until it breaks off, and I count the number of times I fold the corner. (Worth noting is Nicholas Baker’s book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, which argues against this method of testing the brittleness of paper. Baker finds it appalling that preservationists destroy the materials they are meant to be saving but is particularly unhappy at the move by libraries in the last few decades to jettison paper copies of newspapers and other materials in favor of digital preservation.)
I then search the book in the library’s system to see if there are other copies and reprints available. I search WorldCat to see how many copies are available in that aggregated catalog (counting in particular the number available in the five-state area around Minnesota). And then I search BookFinder.com to see if copies and reprints are widely available. Most of the books I work with were published and printed before 1920 and are fun to flip through to see photos, illustrations, and other things that show the age in which they were written.
Here are a couple of images of books that I researched today:



















