It’s around 65 degrees in the lab, with a humidity between 30% and 55%, just the way the patients like it. The tiled floor is polished and clean. Highly specialized tools are carefully laid out. The knowledgeable staff are well trained in emergency procedures; treatments must be scrupulously measured and administered.
But the large, colorful rolls of fabric on racks on the wall and the warm, unmasked smiles greeting you communicate that it’s information, not human lives at stake.
This is the Alice Hastings Murphy Book Preservation Lab, a quiet office tucked away on the third floor of the Science Library. Named for the University’s first library director, the lab - part of the University Libraries - is where a small team of dedicated, detailed and patient people have a very specific mission: rescue and protect valuable books.
Ann C. Kearney, Preservation Services Coordinator
Not many people can claim to be masters of an ancient craft. Ann Kearney MSIS ’14 might listen to novels through the speakers in her car these days, but she knows the classic art of bookmaking inside and out. As an English major immersed in typesetting for her college poetry magazine, Kearney became interested in both the verbal and visual aspects of the printing process. After completing a BA at Rosemont College, she went back for a BFA at the Cleveland Institute of Art with a focus on letterpress printing, papermaking and handmade books from an artist's point of view. Next, a Fulbright Grant brought her to Camberwell College of Arts in London for a year-long intensive study of bookbinding.
Kearney became an associate conservator at Case Western Reserve University Libraries before working in private practice for many years in northern Ohio where her client list included the Cleveland Public Library, Kent State University and several private collectors. She joined the UAlbany Libraries as a collections conservator in 2009.
Now, it’s her deep well of expertise the University relies on to keep its most prized and vulnerable materials living safely on the shelf.
Mary Howard, Conservation Technician
When Mary Howard ’94 was hired as a library clerk here at her alma mater in 2005, she had never heard of book preservation. Growing up, she frequented her local library, dreaming among the stacks about someday working there. As a clerk, her childhood enthusiasm remained and her supervisor took notice. She offered Howard a professional development opportunity to learn about bookbinding and Howard never looked back. She continued to grow her preservation knowledge and skills through workshops and on-the-job training.
Howard earned a reputation in the department for her careful work and attention to detail after making copies of a ragged oversized U.S. map in parts and painstakingly piecing them back together along the country’s thousands of county lines. “It was a geography resource that needed help,” she says of the first of many maps from the Libraries’ general collections she would work on. “And now I can fold a map!”
Howard also supports the lab's efforts to digitize items from the University’s archives. Wish you still had that copy of Torch from that year you can’t quite remember? Howard is making every page of yearbooks published since 1900 available through the archives’ website.
There is a misconception that the work of a preservation lab is to restore old books to their original glory. Not true, says UAlbany anthropology doctoral candidate Kaori Otera Chen, who works in the lab. “It's not like repairing or fixing. We try to keep things as they are.” Like the rich colors of a patina that forms naturally on copper with age, Chen says, “we don't try to remove the green part, but we appreciate and embrace the new beauty.”
Chen holds up what looks like a paper bag and points to a small tear on its side. The bag is actually the outer component of a book, a vessel for the pages and words held inside, and the tear will stay. It’s part of the story now. Chen’s job is to customize a protective box, a cozy home where the book can be comfortably stored without further damage.
To do this, she’s carefully measured out and cut blocks of Ethafoam, an archival quality polyethylene material that provides cushioning inside the box but won’t discolor or disintegrate paper like traditional plastic. She also places Ethafoam inside the bag, allowing it to retain its shape while leaving space for the pages to nestle within. “I just want people to see the intention of the author. I treat it as a book, but also art,” Chen says.
This book was published in 2006. Another misconception about book preservation is that it’s only for brittle tomes of centuries past. The lab works closely with their sister office down the hall, the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections, to identify items in need of specialized storage and create custom enclosures like Chen’s.
The book she worked on was selected from Special Collections to be part of a 2023 University Art Museum exhibition called Libros/Arte: Handmade Books from Latin America & the Caribbean, which explored the intersection between books and art. More than 80 pieces were on display, and many came to the lab for help in preserving their unconventional features before they could be safely returned to library shelving.
Of course, the lab does work with historic volumes too, though they tend to be sturdier than those that were more recently published. “It's the 20th century and late 19th century books that have paper that's crumbling,” explains Kearney. “Older paper was made by hand from cotton and linen rag.” Machines were introduced during the Industrial Revolution to process materials more quickly, and the cost-saving shift to the use of wood pulp resulted in an excess of acid in the manufacture that eats away at the final product. “If you've ever seen an old newspaper that's gone yellow, that’s the acidification,” adds Howard.
For many of the University’s oldest and rarest books, a drop-spine box is the best safeguard for long-term preservation. This type of enclosure is complicated to construct, requiring exact measurements and precision cutting. “It's quite an undertaking,” says Kearney of the multi-step assembly process. But it ends with a safely housed artifact that can live on as a valuable resource.
Occasionally direct intervention on older books is necessary. “Where [the damage] is structural and the item could be in danger, you could lose pieces, we do repair things like that,” says Kearney. “But we want to do as little as possible to make it whole again.” Fortunately, the Alice Hastings Murphy Lab is equipped with everything a conservation professional needs to handle a variety of issues.
The Workstation – individual workspaces for staff, volunteers and students who have to be skilled with their hands but also able to creatively conceptualize how an enclosure should be customized for each item.
Book Press – used in the repair of books in need of rebinding. The broad and intense pressure helps any glue set evenly.
Board Sheer – a large-scale slicer that can cut through a stack of paper or thick cardboard. Its intimidating capacity as a weapon is mitigated with safety features like a counterweight on the blade to prevent it from crashing down unexpectedly.
Board Creaser – a firm but gentle pressure created from bouncing on the lever allows the user to make just the right fold in a piece of cardboard that will make a protective box.
Sewing Frame – a support structure that holds a book in place for hand-sewn binding repairs.
The Bookeye® 5 – a high-quality scanner used in the digitization of archived materials, like the University’s Torch yearbooks.
Buckram Fabric – used in covering drop-spine boxes. On the underside is a sturdy paper lining allowing glue to adhere without staining the fabric.
Emergency Response Plan – a semi-annually updated binder (and PDF document) of procedures, contingency actions and contact information in case of a library emergency.
June 2014 – Campus was quiet for the summer. In the basement of the Science Library, a student methodically reshelving returned items noticed a serious problem. Water was leaking from a disconnected pipe along the ceiling onto the stacks in front of her. For a library, this is a disaster scenario.
The staff immediately put the Preservation Department’s Emergency Response Plan into action. Kearney and Howard were among those called to the scene. “We had a dozen or more people down there taking books off shelves and putting them on carts, identifying everything because we had to keep records,” Kearney remembers.
The pipe wasn’t exactly gushing but had been undiscovered long enough to create a potentially worse predicament: mold. In cases like this, the University contracts with an outside vendor to clean damaged materials. However, the company was several days out from responding, too long to contain the mold and posing a health risk to people in the building.
Emergency procedure calls for freezing to suspend mold growth. The lab has a small freezer for the occasional moldy book, but nothing that could accommodate the 500 items that were affected. “Since it was summer, the dorms were not full” Kearney recalls. “And the dorms have walk-in freezers.”
The response team rolled cart after cart of soggy books into the dining hall freezers of Indigenous Tower. A few days later, they walked them out again. After making sure everything was accounted for, the vendor took them off-site.
Leaks are unfortunately common in libraries. “That is their big emergency,” Kearney says. “You read about fires, which are terrible, but water emergencies happen all the time.” In this case, thanks to the department’s emergency plan, well-trained library staff and some quick thinking, every item was salvageable.
Kearney also notes the importance of working with first responders to resolve an emergency in a way that reduces additional damage and allows for later restoration, such as using a lower water pressure when putting out a fire. “It's nice that we have CEHC here,” she says. “We've been trying to work more with them to coordinate all the expertise they have with the needs we could have.”
Book preservation is quiet and important work. Kearney, Howard and students like Chen are the unassuming guardians of historical record, working to enshrine the past — and the present — so future generations can continue to look back on it.
With hands moving nimbly over her workstation, Chen muses about the lab as an analog oasis in a sea of digital overload. “When I think about campus,” she says, “I can't really think about any other place that requires this kind of work and your attention as a whole being. You have to use your hands with your heart, you have to feel everything. And I feel that's very important for us to be real humans.”
Special thanks: The staff of the Alice Hastings Murphy Preservation Department and Tyler Norton from University Libraries
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