Frass: debris or excrement produced by insects.
This manuscript is part of the José Agusto Escoto collection of Cuban history and literature. The 1574 manuscript in a later binding had extensive beetle damage from its previous life in the Caribbean when it arrived at Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. There were such copious frass deposits that large sections of the 119 pages were stuck together, so much so that the text could not be read. Karen Walter, senior paper conservation technician, had a lot of work ahead of her.
The manuscript needed to be stabilized for digitization by disbinding, separating the fragile pages, re-attaching the fragments with media, and rehousing in Mylar sleeves.
It was the “separating” part of this task that worried Karen until, during disbinding, she realized that the frass was very brittle. She did a test using a Teflon tool to apply pressure through the paper on top of a small area of frass and was surprised when it crumbled away allowing her to slide a microspatula further between the two pages until it hit the next deposit. In the worst cases, this step was repeated dozens of times.
As a result, the pages were successfully separated with minimal loss of media revealing text which had been inaccessible for many years. And as a bonus, it turned out that crushing desiccated bug poop for days was a lot of fun!
For Ask A Conservator Day, bringing back one of the more heroic efforts from Harvard Library’s amazing and highly skilled conservation team.
Frass: debris or excrement produced by insects.
This manuscript is part of the José Agusto Escoto collection of Cuban history and literature. The 1574 manuscript in a later binding had extensive beetle damage from its previous life in the Caribbean when it arrived at Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. There were such copious frass deposits that large sections of the 119 pages were stuck together, so much so that the text could not be read. Karen Walter, senior paper conservation technician, had a lot of work ahead of her.
The manuscript needed to be stabilized for digitization by disbinding, separating the fragile pages, re-attaching the fragments with media, and rehousing in Mylar sleeves.
It was the “separating” part of this task that worried Karen until, during disbinding, she realized that the frass was very brittle. She did a test using a Teflon tool to apply pressure through the paper on top of a small area of frass and was surprised when it crumbled away allowing her to slide a microspatula further between the two pages until it hit the next deposit. In the worst cases, this step was repeated dozens of times.
As a result, the pages were successfully separated with minimal loss of media revealing text which had been inaccessible for many years. And as a bonus, it turned out that crushing desiccated bug poop for days was a lot of fun!
So, Octavia Butler willed her “papers” to the Huntington. But she lived past the time of email correspondence, so the exhibit contained some email printouts. Which made me wonder, these days if a notable person wills their “papers” somewhere, does that include email correspondence and computer drafts of speeches or manuscripts? How is all that stuff retrieved? What about old computers that are no longer in use?
Please, reblog this guys… I want to reach some librarians on this because I’m super curious.
Great question! This is one of the biggest challenges in libraries like ours right now. 21st century authors write with computers, and we want to preserve those records and make them available to researchers just as we always have done with records on paper. That’s why when we recently acquired author Jamaica Kincaid’s “papers” we acquired her laptops as well (above). Future generations wouldn’t be able to study her life and writing without the crucial primary evidence.
In 1611, Johannes Kepler published this important work on the six-sided symmetry of snowflakes, an important advance in the field of crystallography. You may notice that the right half of the title page has been “silked”, an obsolete conservation practice which reinforced damaged paper by attaching a very fine sheet of silk gauze.
Kepler, Johannes, 1571-1630. Strena, seu, De niue sexangula, 1611.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
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No love for whomever used these pink heart-shaped post-it notes in one of our library books. They are now firmly attached to the page, even after only being placed there less than 8 months ago. Our circulation staff sent this book to Preservation after they tried to remove one of the notes, and it ended up taking away some of the page with it!
Please, please don’t use post-it notes in library books!
Many of the books at Houghton Library today were once part of the regular circulating collections. Take care of library books today so they’ll be around for the future!
Follow 5daysofpreservation to see more examples of what folks who work in the field do on a daily basis, including installing a new exhibition here at Houghton.