Going, Going, Gone

It has become quite apparent that I will not be returning to this blog. Rather than just let it dangle out there in cyberspace, I will be shutting down operations at the end of the month and "Library Preservation" will be no more.

Library Preservation Goes Offline

I began this blog about three and a half years, and over 300 postings ago. It has been a lot of fun, but it has also been bit of a drain on time and mental energy. Likewise, over the last six years I've conducted over 20 workshops in book repair or special collections preservation around the state of Michigan. By my estimate I've taught well over 200 people. (This does not include shorter conference talks or my teaching at Wayne State University.) These too have been a drain on time and mental energy.

It is time for me to withdraw and enter a period of hibernation. I did my last workshop last week, and will schedule no more. And now I will also stop posting on this blog.

Its not that my interests in the topic are waning, but letting go of these tasks will give me the mental space and time to work on some of my own art and writing projects - which have nothing to do with libraries or preservation. I will still try to keep up with what is going on the preservation webosphere. If there are times when I feel compelled to write something preservation related - I'll probably send it over to the good folks at PCAN.

Thanks to all who've ever left a comment or posted a kind word about this blog - my vanity has been greatly inflated. I've thoroughly enjoyed the curious kind of community of colleagues that I've been gifted with through this blog.

Preservation For the People! - Lig-Free or DIE!

Friday job listings

This week I've got not one, but two preservation librarian positions in two very different locales:

University of Miami (Coral Gables, Florida)

Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois)

Future of the Book Conference

Happening in Ann Arbor on Oct. 10.

"Our institutions such as libraries, archives, and universities all rely on the distribution and also the control of information, and as members of these institutions, it is imperative to join together with no borders to investigate the consequences to our institutions and our society as we alter one of our fundamental information conduits. We need to carefully choose what we need to preserve and what we will become."

It looks like a great event with interesting speakers and I'd be there, if it wasn't also the Canuck Thanksgiving weekend. (And yes, Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving pretty much the same as Americans do except its without the pilgrims, at a far more appropriate time of the year, and without that goofy post-Thanksgiving pseudo-holiday Black Friday.)

Does your disaster plan cover zombies?

(Somehow I missed this over the weekend.)

Apparently the disaster planning folk at the University of Florida had the great foresight to include zombie attacks in their disaster preparedness plan - or at least they did until the original document was removed. But, there are few hiding places on the internets, so enjoy.

Keep your stinking paws off the books

(picture from Globe.com - surely they could take a less blurry picture?!)

How do you solve book thefts - with bars over the books so they can't be removed from the shelves, of course. It seems Harvard is getting creative (and lo-tech) with their theft deterrence devices.

Good advice and bad repairs

The best piece of advice I have ever received or given is "Don't forget to breathe."

I've recently come to the realization that the second best piece of advice I've ever received or given is "Listen" - or put a different way "Pay attention."

Book repair can often become routine and rote. In general, most late 19th and 20th century mass-produced books are relatively similar, with some minor, but common, variations. To the person who regularly repairs these types of materials, this regularity and familiarity is both a help, and a potential stumbling block.

The structure and damage of each book that comes across your work bench is probably very much like many other books you have worked on. The similarity means that you don't need to "reinvent the wheel" with each book. With regular practice of repairing these materials, your mind and hands learn what needs to be done.

The problem with getting into this kind of routine repair is you run the risk not "listening" or paying attention to what you are working on. Your hands, which have done this repair over and over again try to force the book to behave in a way that so many other books have, but this particular book might not want to. When your hands start telling books what to do, rather than paying attention to how the book is responding to the various forces you are applying to it, you run the risk of a bad repair.

This happened to me today - and this is my confession. When I was finished with the book, I looked at it, and I felt ashamed. Okay - in the grand scheme of things, it was a mediocre repair of an inconsequential binding of an inconsequential book - but I should have listened to the book. (And no, I am not going to share an image of this repair online.)