A View from the Stacks - Intern Journal Kersti's Week Two

Hi everybody!

Well, I've survived two weeks at the Chrysler, and it's been great! This past week's theme was preservation, which is something I've never gotten a chance to do, so I was really excited. I spent the first day making book enclosures, which are paper structures that completely cover and protect books from environmental damage (and each other). By measuring, cutting, and pasting, you can make an enclosure that fits the book like a glove. Although I've never been very good at arts-and-crafts, I managed to make a few passable enclosures for some of the Myers Collection books, and will continue to work on them throughout my internship. 

The next day I went to work cleaning some of the auction catalogs from the Knoedler Collection, a series of auction catalogs that the museum acquired in 1977. Some time in the 1940s (either during the London air-raids of WWII or in 1942- I'm still trying to find out exactly which), the library of M. Knoedler & Co. suffered a fire that left many of these auction catalogs in various states of disrepair. I took a shelf of these books and attempted to clean off at much soot as possible with the help of an eraser, a sponge, and a Ghostbusters-esque vacuum!

All of the preservation tools!

What I found most surprising was just how much soot there was! To my untrained eye, many parts of the books looked decent, although old, but after wiping down  a couple of pages and covers, the sponge was nearly black.

This is how dirty the sponge was at the halfway point.

Compare to how clean it was above!



A few pages that I thought were simply yellowed with age showed a visible difference after being treated with the eraser or sponge, which made me wonder just how many of the older books I own could look years younger after some skilled cleaning.

 Before...

...and after!



The rest of the week was spent doing a variety of tasks, each which showed me a different aspect of working in a library: I attended the museum's popular after-hours book club, where we discussed Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and its relation to the current Civil War exhibit in the museum; Laura let me sit in on an exhibition meeting, where the various departments of the museum discussed plans for an upcoming spring exhibit; I went through some meeting books, many of which were over a century old, from a local group of Civil War veterans; and I worked on some extra projects, like my book trailer, which highlights a work in the library's collection (more on this soon!). 

Next week's post will focus on something else I've never done before: cataloging!

-Kersti Francis, Summer 2011 Library Services Intern