Cleaning books

To clean regular old dust, we vacuum.  It's faster than wiping.  Treated
cloths work, too, however.

We are in the process of writing specifications to hire people to clean
two moldy areas for us.  I'll be happy to send that to you when we're
finished, but it may not be timely enough for you.

If you are going to clean mold, especially if it is a recurring problem
in your library, I would contact the Philadelphia Center for Art and
Historic Artifacts and ask for their new technical leaflet on mold.  It
updates (in summary form, but clearly) a lot of research out there,
including research on the safety and effectiveness of fungicides.  It
also gives good advice on how to clean books and what safety precautions
to take.  Believe them! Contact Glen Ruzicka at 215-545-0613.

We have written into our disaster plan how to respond to mold outbreaks.

We are trying to hire others to clean a group of books from a chemistry
library that will be integrated into our stacks. We decided not to
contract, but to hire, train, and supervise ourselves. One complication
is that the mold is in the spines of the books.  We cannot rebind, but
we may cut off the spines, clean them, and repair them.  Sounds like a
lot of trouble, doesn't it?  It's cheaper than contaminating our whole
collection, rebinding, or microfilming.  Does anyone have advice on
cleaning spines without cutting them off?

In brief, we will vacuum with either a wet vac (Lysol in the tank) or
HEPA vacuum (both are available to us), then wipe with alcohol (dry rag
for leather or color sensitive books).  Alcohol helps remove stains,
sometimes. We'll quarantine the chemistry books to make sure recurrences
don't happen, and monitor the area in which they will be placed.

I can elaborate but won't take up the space here unless you want more
information.

Annie Armour-Jones
duPont Library
University of the South
Sewanee, Tennessee 37383
615-598-1387

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 8:30
                Distributed: Wednesday, October 26, 1994
                        Message Id: cdl-8-30-003
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