Last week, Special Collections Outreach Librarian Sharon Byrd and Archives Assistant Jim Harris continued our ongoing process of conserving valuable items in our Special Collections, by taking eleven items to Etherington Conservation Services for appraisal and possible conservation. The staff at Etherington will work to rebind rare book with disintegrating spines, restore damaged pages by cleaning them in chemical bathes or by careful touch-up work, and/or build specialized boxes to house particularly valuable artifacts in a more secure and protective manner. While we were hand delivering the items to Etherington, Registrar Brian Crean was kind enough to give us a brief tour of their expert facilities.

In the “book lab,” conservators worked at individual stations repairing, cleaning, or rebinding damaged books employing specialized techniques and tools. Mr. Crean informed us that conservators training is somewhat similar to an apprenticeship: they start working on smaller, easier projects, working with less valuable materials, and as they gain experience they are given more and more challenging and valuable items to work with. Mr. Crean also presented several near-finished projects as examples of the work that the conservators do, including a rebound library book, and a binder containing laminated ledger pages removed from the original binding and protected, as the information was more important than the book itself.

Next, we were taken into the “paper lab” where technicians worked at fume hoods, bathing damaged paper in particular chemical bathes in order to clean them. Mr. Crean explained that the technicians are trained to have to have specialized knowledge of the chemistry of paper, to know what types of chemical cleaning different types of paper can withstand.

Third, we were shown the workshop in which books were bound, or in which the case of periodicals, bound together for the first time. A large warehouse-like space, their were many people at work throughout this assembly-line processing space.

Last, and certainly not least, we were shown the digitization lab. Jim, who has been responsible for some of our own digitization efforts at Davidson, was quite envious of the extremely high-end technology used to create extremely high quality images used in creating digital duplicates of artifacts sent to Etherington. (It was in the space that the digital copy of our own Book of Hours was created.)

In the end, it was a very interesting and worthwhile trip. While we wait to hear the status of our artifacts, I am left wondering how one gains the specialized training the conservators at Etherington have in both art and chemistry, necessary to conduct their very interesting work.

While archivists mostly concern themselves with content, we do also care about the containers.  We value the information in a letter but also respect the value of the paper and handwriting.  Or with a college publication, the words are central but the whole package tells its own story.

And sometimes, we just enjoy the added bits. Letterheads are a particular favorite of mine.  They often don’t add much to the college’s historical context but can make for fun moments while researching.  Below are examples of stationary in our collections.

What is fun about this letterhead besides the architectural details is that it lists the members of the Committee on Rules and By-Laws. While at Davidson, Hill had a strong interest in rules and discipline.

William J. Martin, Sr. was a chemistry professor at Davidson (and father of another chemistry professor).  His correspondence with chemical companies gives some insights into how he taught his courses and this envelope gives a look at apparatus from the 1860s.

This one is fun because Davidson College is not inclined to decorative banisters thus inviting some wondering where they might go. In fact, the college was not looking for railings but a tablet for the new Carnegie Library.

President Henry Louis Smith wrote to the Secretary of State regarding a change in the college’s charter to allow the college to hold more real property and personal property.  In the response, the letterhead took up almost as much space as the text.

 

What caught my eye here is the small detail of the dragon boat. Someday I’ll donate the medals from some of the college’s winning Dragon Boat teams to the archives.

 

The Rev. DuBose is a Davidson alumni from the class of 1897.   He’s writing to recommend a student and his letterhead tells us he’s writing in his study.

 

The parent of a Davidson student took some time while traveling in New York to write the college president about his son. Ironically, the theme of the letter is to discourage the son from any further travels during the semester.