Month: April 2021

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Reformatting Throughout the Ages

Written by Emilye Lewin, Preservation Reformatting, Collections Care, and Digitization Services hourly employee

When books become too brittle or damaged to circulate, they are routed to Preservation Services so that a preservation decision can be made. While the Library is committed to building and sustaining library collections for the use of students, faculty, visiting scholars, and the public, the physical and chemical compositions of many items actively work against this goal. Books become worn with time, so to combat degradation, the Preservation Reformatting department reformats these items to ensure they can be used by patrons without undergoing further damage. Today, reformatting takes the form of digitization, but this was not always the case. The timeline below shows the different forms reformatting has taken over the years to illustrate how librarians and preservationists have provided access to damaged materials.

Reformatting: The Early Years

1851     Daguerreotypes suggested for preservation

1920s    Commercialized for preservation and widespread use

1930s  Newspaper preservation begins plagued by quality control issues like lighting, contrast, film stock quality, etc.

1935    Microfilm is introduce – Microfilm rose in popularity when Recordak, a    division of Kodak, used a 35mm microfilm camera to film and publish the New York Times on microfilm. Microfilm quickly became a solution to the many preservation and storage issues inherent in newspaper collections and government documents.

1971  Project Gutenberg – Volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works. Created by a former University of Illinois student.

Contemporary Reformatting Projects at UIUC

Because polyester film has a life expectancy of at least 500 years, we still use microfilm as a means of best preservation practice today. The microfilm itself is often considered to be the preservation copy, while digital files are created from the microfilm as access copies to be used by the public. The timeline below shows how microfilm projects at UIUC have evolved into digitization projects.

1982    United States Newspaper Project. Started at UIUC in 1987 as a partnership between UIUC, the Chicago History Museum, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. We have cataloged over 20,500 newspaper titles and resulted in the creation of the Illinois Newspaper Project Database so patrons can access newspapers digitally.

2004  Microfilm Goes Digital – National Digital Newspaper Program. The goal of this project is to enhance accessibility of innovative newspaper content for researchers and scholars. UIUC is currently focused on selecting items that represent a wide variety of geographic, temporal, and demographic groups, specifically labor, African American, and non-English language newspapers.

2004 Google Books -Joint partnership with prominent research libraries in order to build a shared digital repository combining digitized public domain materials from each library’s individual collection into one easily accessible online resource. Public domain materials are available to view, search, or download while only basic information (such as title, author’s name, and a few lines of descriptive text) are provided for items protected by copyright laws.

2014 Internet Archive Partnership – As part of a partnership and customized preservation workflow, Internet Archive staff are located inside the Main Library and perform in-house digitization. This is a unique reformatting workflow as it ensures Library materials never leave the building. Internet Archive has digitized over 16,000,000 eBooks and growing, with over 73,000 books from UIUC.

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A Brief Walkthrough of Our Bindery Options

Written by Victoria Schmitz, Collections Care Graduate Assistant

At the library’s preservation unit, we send items to a commercial bindery when they need to be rebound. Described below are some of our options of binding and how we decide which binding style is appropriate for individual items.

Example of digicover bind in cover candidate.

If an item needs to go to the bindery, our first preferred option is to send it in as digicover (paperback or hardcover) or digicover bind in cover (paperback only). With this option, the informational and/or artistic value of the item’s cover and/or inside covers can be preserved through a professional copy printed on a hardback casing, as well as binding in the original cover.

Digicovers have a size restriction, so if the item does not meet the requirements, the next best stop is custom bind in covers, or economy bind in covers. The item must be paperback for both of these options so that the covers can be bound in the buckram cover with the rest of the text block. Custom is for sewn binding while economy is for perfect bound items.

Example of a binding that is sewn.
Example of perfect bound.

If the item does not meet the digicover requirements, has sewn binding, the text block is not broken, and is a hardback with informational and/or artistic value on or inside the covers, we can send the item to our Conservation unit. If the item is not qualified for conservation, then it will need to be sent to Collections Care for bindery prep so that we can copy the covers. We will cut the copies to the appropriate size and then send to the item and loose pages to the bindery as a custom monograph.

An item that does not have informational and/or artistic value on or inside its covers has routes that depend on if it is paperback/hardback and its binding. Paperback follows the instructions above, but if it does not have informational and/or artistic value, it will not hurt to copy or bind in the original covers. As for hardcover, the item will be sent in as custom monograph.

Example of informational and/or artistic value on the inside of covers.
Example of a custom monograph candidate.

 

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A Preservation Chat Reflecting a Year into the COVID-19 Pandemic & our Local Emergency Access Digitization System Workflow

Two Digitization Workflows, Both Alike in Dignity, in Fair Preservation, where we lay our scene… it has been just over a year since the state of Illinois issued a stay-at-home order and we hustled to close our labs and offices to work remotely. COVID-19 had arrived regionally, and we departed the building for our homes in the spring. By mid-summer, we were starting to repopulate the library cautiously in limited numbers. We tested weekly, and then biweekly following campus SHIELD saliva testing protocols, and shipments in and out of the library followed quarantine restrictions to limit the chance of shared contact infections. As a non-public-facing unit, our work in Preservation Services could carry on in the background. Shortly after returning to the office, often on staggering shifts or as the only person in an area, we set to work supporting an experiment to provide digital first access to all general collection requests.

Here’s a conversation we had reflecting on the good that’s come out of all of this:

Will: My first thought when we started up with this was, how can we leverage existing digitization workflows to meet the needs of an extremely increased general collections patron request demand?

William Schlaack, Digital Reformatting Coordinator

Rachael: I was optimistic, but uncertain of how we’d get up to speed and keep momentum, especially considering we were starting from a complete stop in services. I remember an early talk about what we were going to try to do with Kyle, Jennifer, you and Shelby about getting this going and feeling a bit like we had just come back from off season to a culminating test of skills and agility.

Will: After that, it was sort of setting up the parameters for items that we are unable to scan with any sort of fast turnaround time and thus would need to be sent to the locker pickup workflow. Initially it was very difficult to deduce what our capacity for scanning was with our existing infrastructure.

Rachael: I was glad to meet our colleagues Diane and Johna, who came to us from other library areas to help. Their willingness to learn how to use our equipment and adapted workflows as we started sorting out the day to day of hands-on digitizing of all the books has been a positive constant.

Will: A lot of this was taking old techniques and applying them in new ways with new people.

Rachael Johns, Digital Imaging Specialist II

Rachael: I agree, I think the people aspect was a really big factor. We had people learning some fairly complex technical processes from scratch, and we improvised as we went. I was so thankful that came together and I remember Jennifer emphasizing the people aspect, a willingness for this experimental approach, and that came through for us. All the other things, that maybe were big hurdles, seemed smaller in comparison.

Will: We used and tried to investigate making do with what we had, pushing that to the limit, and learning that we really needed to scale up the DS side of things because our existing general collections digitization that I manage wasn’t built to have this quick turn-around time and scale – DS went from digitizing rare manuscripts to mass market paperbacks over the course of a month.

Rachael: Yes. It was interesting!

Will: With realized that with our on-site Internet Archive scanning center we would only be able to continue to scan content through them that is in the public domain. After some real quick calculations, we realized that out of all the requests items in the public domain accounted for only about five percent of the total, so that didn’t take a lot of the pressure off of Digitization Services. Nonetheless, the triage and digitization processes are always balancing acts, with the need for prompt turn-around times promised to patrons, what we could logistically handle. Our communication has always been more or less the following: what are we getting, what does the queue look like, how are we ensuring a balance of efficient delivery time and meeting needs for patrons? Except now the scale and turnaround time are both greatly expanded and expediated, respectively.

Rachael: Maybe to me this aspect is sort of game, keeping things balanced, or at least I’ve tried to approach things that way to stay energized – everything is so trying so coming back to the team vibes, after a year, it’s not the details I’m remembering most it’s getting to know the people involved.

Will: It has been interesting when what we do becomes the forefront of what’s needed, but that magnitude is not something we were traditionally equipped for… we’re used to being in the background and now we’re more public facing and collaborating with staff from all over. I think we’re certainly the better for it. This has been an exercise in opening up channels of communication.

Rachael: It’s been somewhat surreal, from the quiet first coming back to campus. At that time from being remote to in person I was still interacting remotely with Brynlee, Kim, Henry and Angela in a tiny unit that is used to a much different focus to fall and winter, now having more staff with help from great people like Christine and Tabby and shifting back to Special Collections support on a daily, which we kept working with on a much smaller scale but now a year later, getting back into a more regular schedule for.

Will: It’s been trying to meet a quantity, before the reigning paradigm was quality.

Rachael: Right, the needs of a general collections workflow are not the same as the needs of an exhibit in New York City being blown up 20 feet tall! Will you be glad to get back to normal or do you think some of this is here to stay?

Will: It will be interesting to see the role, with the new normalcy and increase comfort with remote work capacities, this injection of ideas about remote and online access to things will have, I don’t think it’s going away. It will always be lingering as people find new ways to approach usage. I would hope to some extent we take the spirit of collaboration and quick thinking that was developed through this process and ensure that we sort of continue to meet shifting patron needs.

Rachael: Quick thinking and support from the library for our small area here in DS to step up to this challenge, was so impactful. I’ve enjoyed the interpersonal aspects helping this effort. We were a small existing team in DS, and now we have new people in DS. Shelby was fairly new, and working with you both from across the hall, and all these new professional relationships has been a really great outcome.

Will: It’s exciting to see our initial ad-hoc and frankly cobbled-together experimental workflow become a much more defined and collaborative institutional procedure and policy working in concert with departments across the library. That’s been good to see. I’m really proud of everything not just our digitization staff have accomplished, but staff across the library as well, to meet this unique challenge and serve our patrons safely and efficiently.

Rachael: Agreed!

A special thanks goes out to Tabby Garbutt, who loaned us the opening line of this blog post and has the unique perspective of having worked on both workflows on this project, IA and DS!