By Michele Hamill

August 2015 marked the 30th anniversary of the Cornell Library’s conservation program. The traditional gift for a 30th anniversary is a pearl–a gemstone of great beauty, and a term meaning something rare, fine and valuable. We’ve had three gifts– three very fine directors–in our 30 years. Tre Berney, Barbara Berger Eden, and John Dean are each a pearl in their own right.

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Tre Berney as Director of Digitization and Conservation Services. (Interesting note: Tre hails from Tennessee—whose state gem is the pearl and has the only freshwater pearl cultivation outside of Asia!). This new position was created to provide leadership for both Preservation and Conservation Services and the Digital Media Group.

Tre has been at Cornell for almost 3 years developing and implementing AV digitization workflows to preserve Cornell University’s unique A/V holdings and digital collections. He designed and established a digitization lab to digitize fragile recordings and older legacy formats. Tre and Library colleagues just completed a campus-wide A/V census, the first of its kind at Cornell, as part of a larger A/V initiative partnering the library with Cornell IT to inform a preservation strategy for those formats at imminent risk of degradation, loss and obsolescence. He works closely with Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, Indiana University, Audio/Visual Preservation Solutions, Syracuse University, UCLA, Columbia and the Library of Congress. His work in A/V preservation ensures that Cornell’s unique assets in the form of lectures by faculty, Nobel Laureates, writers and artists, and original source recordings used in research in biology, linguistics and art will be available in the future.

Tre brings a wealth of skills and experiences to this position along with energy, enthusiasm and appreciation for the Library’s collections and the work we do in the conservation program. We’re excited to have Tre leading our program and look forward to collaborating to preserve the many formats that comprise the Library’s collections.

We are also celebrating Barbara Berger Eden and her significant contributions to Cornell Library as she retires this week after 30 years of service. In Barbara’s tenure at Cornell Library, she served several key roles including manager for ambitious microfilming projects, grants officer, and Principal Investigator for successful grants including Save America’s Treasures and the Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Librarian Preservation Training Initiative which strengthens Cornell Library’s relationship with our partner libraries in China by fostering exchange between the academic library communities in the United States and China. Due to Barbara’s efforts, the preservation capability across China has been expanded and important materials for teaching and research are being preserved.

As director of Preservation and Conservation Services since 2005, Barbara led the conservation program through times of great change in academic research libraries with insight, advocacy, and collegiality. As a result, our conservation program has thrived, with dedicated staff with deep expertise and the resources to preserve Library collections in their original format.

Barbara is the past chair of the Preservation and Reformatting Section of the American Library Association and has been an active member of the Preservation Administrators Group of the New York State Comprehensive Research Libraries. Barbara has served as a wonderful mentor to several Library staff as part of the Library’s Mentoring Program sharing her wide experience, knowledge, and perspective to foster the professional growth of our colleagues. We are deeply appreciative of Barbara’s efforts on our behalf and her thoughtfulness, generosity and support. We wish her a healthy, happy retirement filled with good gardening, family and friends. She will be missed.

John Dean became Cornell University Library’s first conservation and preservation librarian with the establishment of the program in 1985 and served as director for nearly 20 years before retiring in 2003. John’s background, including a 6-year apprenticeship in bookbinding in his native England, some years spent as journeyman bookbinder, leadership of preservation programs at the Newberry Library and Johns Hopkins University, and two graduate degrees (in library science and in liberal arts with a concentration in the history of science), made him a rare and valuable combination of an effective administrator, master bookbinder, and consummate conservator.

As director of the department, John brought a profound knowledge and deep regard for collections in all formats and instilled an appreciation for fine craftsmanship grounded in professional standards for conservation. He mentored and taught at the local, national and international levels. In 2003 John was the recipient of the prestigious Association for Library Collections & Technical Services Paul Banks & Carolyn Harris Preservation Award for his significant contributions to the field.

John remains passionate about preservation and conservation and has endeavored to help institutions around the world through education, training and consultancies in developing countries, such as Laos, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Java, and Cambodia. He created seminal online tutorials for library conservation and preservation in Southeast Asia, Iraq and the Middle East to give librarians and archivists in these and other countries a set of basic guidelines to inform their preservation efforts. In retirement John continues to assist local institutions care for their book collections. John’s legacy has had a lasting impact on the preservation and conservation field, on Cornell University Library, and on those of us who had the honor and privilege of working with him.

Where will we be in the next 30 years? Undoubtedly, there will be new challenges, formats, and discoveries. Thanks to our 3 distinguished directors, Tre, Barbara, and John, Cornell Library’s conservation program is ready to serve the preservation and conservation needs of the Library well into the future. A sincere thank you to Oya Rieger, Associate University Librarian, for her leadership, vision, and support of our program. Stay connected with us on our Facebook page and on this blog for updates on our many projects and for some pearls of wisdom for caring for library collections.

Michele Hamill

Our new cart for transporting posters, architectural drawings, photographs and maps arrived this week. We have long struggled to transport oversize collection materials safely between the Conservation Lab and the Rare and Manuscripts Collections (RMC). It was 2-person job to navigate through 6 doorways (all different widths), tight turns and 2 elevators with standard flat beds. It wasn’t good for the collections or for our backs!

Thanks to our wonderful colleague Wendy McPhee, conservator for the Toronto Public Library, who alerted us to G.S. Manufacturing in Canada, we now have a custom-built transport cart that safely supports 36” x 48” (and larger) folders in the “U” of the cart, full size cartons on the bottom shelf or additional flat materials, and has a removable lid which can also serve as a work surface.

We have been treating and rehousing several poster collections in the Conservation Lab recently which will now be able to be safely and efficiently returned to RMC with the new cart. WWI and WWII propaganda posters were a visually appealing public campaign to mobilize citizens to the needs of war, unify support, and motivate patriotism. Subjects for the posters included conservation and rationing, recruiting, war bonds, and the perils of careless talk, among others.

The WWII posters arrived in the lab in a tight, flattened bundle. In this state, they were not able to be used by researchers, processed by RMC staff, or safely housed.

With conservation treatment, these oversize posters (3’ x 4’ and larger) are transformed into a spectacular resource.

Unlike the WWI and WWII propaganda posters which were meant for display in public, WWII Newsmaps, produced weekly during the war years, were created for display in military installations to inform and update troops with recent war developments.

The Newsmaps, like the posters, were inaccessible due to being tightly rolled for decades. The Newsmaps on the outside of the roll were badly damaged with numerous tears. As you can imagine, the paper used for weekly Newsmaps in a time of war, was not high-grade and is now brittle and easily torn.

After cleaning, humidification and flattening, and tear and loss stabilization, the Newsmaps are ready for return to RMC to be made available to researchers.

With 2 more rolls of Newsmaps to treat and rehouse, we’ll look forward to many happy returns to RMC with our new transport cart that fits through all doorways and elevators and drives like a dream!

Tre Berney

During the American Library Association’s Preservation Week (April 26-May 2, 2015) libraries all over the country present events, activities, and resources that highlight what we can do, individually and together, to preserve our personal and shared history. To start off Preservation Week 2015, Tre Berney, Multimedia Specialist at Cornell University Library, is sharing his expertise in audio-visual preservation with the following blog post.  Tre designed and established the Library’s digitization lab to digitize fragile recordings and older legacy formats and he is the heading up a campus-wide AV census as part of a larger AV initiative partnering the library with Cornell IT. He works closely with Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, Indiana University, Audio/Visual Preservation Solutions, Syracuse University, UCLA, Columbia and the Library of Congress. Thank you, Tre, for collaborating with us for Preservation Week 2015! –Michele Hamill

First of all, I’m honored to be a guest on our Library’s Conservation Department blog, as they are a great team doing magical things. When discussing audiovisual preservation and the big issues facing possible catastrophic loss of materials on magnetic media, proper conservation becomes even more important as we chart out solutions that may emerge from our campus-wide AV Preservation Initiative.

Both UNESCO’s Blue Ribbon Task Force publication (Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet, 2010) and the Library Of Congress are estimating that the vast majority of materials housed on magnetic tapes (cassettes, open-reel audiotape, VHS, etc.) will be lost in the next 10 years due to degradation and playback obsolescence. This includes materials ranging from field recordings of cultural events in dying languages to your own home movies of grandparents or children.

Cornell University Library’s Collection Development Executive Committee has set up a preservation fund (allocated though a grant-based system) awarded to save fragile, unique, and heavily used collections and, due to issues with legacy AV content, a lot of that fund has gone to digitization of AV collections. As an example, I’m currently working on digitizing a large collection of VHS tapes for the Africana Library of unique lectures given at Cornell in the past. Last year, this collection was moved to the annex, as they are the only copies in existence and are no longer in circulation.

While preservation and digitization is key to older formats, it’s also incredibly challenging for digital formats as well. Digital content, while often easier to use and access in a lot of cases, is incredibly fragile and subject to many problems such as bit rot and errors, proprietary and complex formats and file types, and costly storage. In reality the world is creating digital content at a staggering pace, resulting in petabytes of possibly important or disposable content. How do we deal with this in our work or even in our personal collections of video or photos?

The Library of Congress has provided a thorough resource for individuals to get a handle on the digital content they are creating, as well as digitizing to share with family and friends across the globe. This is a rapidly increasing need of people everywhere, but how do we decide what do we keep and how much? Witness.org stands out as a good example of an organization that is also promoting a more curatorial culture for our content at large, and for a purpose. They provide a guide to archiving content from a journalism/activist perspective, from creation to preservation and access.

Working in a memory institution, I often feel like I’m helping usher content from the past into the future and that is a tremendously gratifying feeling. ‘This work will outlive us,’ is something I often hear said in libraries and archives and while that is true, there is a huge amount of effort and a lot of tough decisions that go into conservation, preservation, and access. Whether it’s a beautiful tome from the 17^th century or video of one of the last known public appearances of Jimmy Hoffa, it takes detailed work, resources, and careful planning to keep these things alive. In reality, history is written by every one of us. What’s your story?