AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

The process of conservation documentation in the course of treatment is intrinsic to the ethical transmission of the conservator’s work. It records the state of an object before, during and after the changes brought about by treatment. It provides a chronicle of decisions made and actions taken. It is also meant to exist in perpetuity with the treated object as a critical archive of change in history over time. Considering the significant value that the process of documentation holds in understanding a collection object, it is strange to think that conservation documentation is rarely if ever easily accessible to researchers or scholars outside the holding institution. Especially given the impact that conservation work can have on the scholarly interpretation, why is our documentation not more widely available?

In the spring of 2022, following a substantial catalog migration, a small, interdisciplinary team at the University of Illinois Library decided to undertake the above question. Specifically, they hoped to pilot a project that allowed historic conservation documentation to be linked to existing catalog records for special collection items and view through the U of I’s existing Digital Library platform. Such a tool would allow for the conservation history of collection items to be a part of academic interpretation, but furthermore, could directly point to the time and care taken for our collections, as well as an access point for conservation education to bring our otherwise “behind-the-scenes" field to the fore.

A straightforward idea in theory, the team quickly found a complex matrix of considerations to make this tool a reality. Creating a metadata profile in the absence of a clear and controlled vocabulary, or even consistent application of terms or writing conventions from practitioner to practitioner, was the first of multiple challenges. Making pragmatic choices for the user interface was yet another. The degree to which the treating practitioner was identified, a further question still. To what extent are we responsible to provide context for understanding conservation treatment documentation in addition to making it accessible? and would each of the U of I Library’s Special Collections have equal enthusiasm for having their collection objects represented to the public in this way? This paper discusses the pathway towards truly making our conservation documentation fully accessible and the success and set-backs we are encountering along the way.

How do users experience items in protective enclosures? Are they confident about how to use them, or do they feel uncertain? The experiences that researchers have while using the collections affect whether they feel included, respected, and empowered. The processes for paging items, using reading rooms, and handling objects can be intimidating and hard to navigate. If we don’t provide instructions or make a process universally understandable, we limit who will use these valuable materials.

In the Enclosures Lab of Harvard Library Preservation Services, we strive to create enclosures for library materials that are intuitive to use. However, until recently, our ideas about what is intuitive were based only on our own speculation. Because of our deep familiarity with preservation enclosures, our experiences were likely to be different from those of our users.

As far as we know, no research has been done on the usability of preservation enclosures. In 2022 we partnered with the Harvard Library’s User Research Center to conduct a study of how library users engage with common enclosures used in the Harvard Library collections. We chose four structures to investigate: a three-flap phase box fastened with strings and washers, a corrugated clamshell box, a cloth-spine portfolio fastened with velcro, and a corrugated two-piece drop-front box. The eleven study participants included Harvard students and library staff members.

The participants were first asked to tell us about their level of experience using preservation enclosures. Then they were asked to open each enclosure, remove the item, replace it, and re-close it. We also asked for their feedback about the experience of using each enclosure. While observing the participants, we took notes that we later analyzed as a group for our final report.

The participants all expressed care for the library materials and the desire to handle them correctly. By design, the enclosure cued participants to handle the item with care, but many said they believed the item inside wasn't meant to be handled by them. Some pain points in using the enclosures included uncertainty about the order in which to close the flaps, not identifying or knowing how to use the drop front on the two-piece box, and uncertainty about the correct orientation of the box. Users expressed a desire for clearer instructions on handling the enclosure and the item inside.

We then queried the conservation community at Harvard and the AIC book and paper online community for examples of instructional labeling for library enclosures and used the results to improve upon our labeling. In October 2023 we completed a follow-up study in which users gave feedback on enclosures with improved labeling. Labels substantially decreased the confusion that we noted in the previous study. Users showed a preference for instructional diagrams and “friendly” language about care and handling.

Through this case study we hope to inspire our colleagues to become curious about the uncertainty their users bring to their interactions with preservation enclosures, and illuminate opportunities for creating enclosures that people can safely and confidently use in their research.

Often, the way to deal with complexity is to create categories that allow us to make sense of the world. However, challenge arises when those structures become rigid and siloed, allowing previously assumed knowledge to become the accepted theory. Over the four years of the Mellon-funded “Assessing the Condition of the National Collection” project, the preservation staff at the Library of Congress compared 500 of the same paper-based volumes of the same title from five different research libraries in distinct environmental regions of the United States through photo-documentation, visual assessment, and physical, chemical, and optical test methods. These roughly 2500 volumes were published throughout a 100-year period from 1840 to 1940, when Western paper production experienced wide-ranging changes, such as shifts from rag to wood pulp, sizing chemistry, and the use of new paper-making equipment. During testing, we were confronted daily with observations and technical data that did not align with our accepted assumptions of book paper materiality. We quickly found that sets of the “same” book frequently showed more differences than similarities in their materiality. We were expecting these “same” titles to largely be identical to each other. However, roughly 25% of the time, different copies of the same title showed evidence of significant differences in materiality, spanning printers’ marks, predicted pulp composition, and physico-chemical properties. Our new “assumptions” were instead that the sets of books from this time period were surprisingly likely to be different in composition. These variations in composition were also found within the same volume, where at least 15% of books tested had multiple paper types. While mixed paper types within one volume are not completely unknown, the extent of their occurrence surprised us, making it difficult to generalize about specific measurements from a single volume when we could clearly see material differences within that book. Some variations led to deeper explorations of why these trends occurred and what the practical preservation consequences might be. Some explanations may implicate societal changes that resulted in considerable experimentation in paper production, such as WWI, the economic downturn, increased mechanization, and different interest levels in specific literary categories. We found that the different geographic regions holding these books had no connection to their current condition. The technical testing data was complex and multivariate, offering no immediate clarity. To deal with this complexity, chemometrics and statistical modeling methods were employed to allow for the identification of subtle trends and more careful or alternative groupings in the data, such as the extent to which colorimetric properties can or cannot correlation to the physical condition. This work will discuss the various upending of our assumptions and broader learnings from this project as we continue to explore its data.