Brittle book repair

[David Walls <david.walls@xxxxxxxx>]

Janice

I would be surprised that any repair could extend the life of embrittled
material "still in demand" by 5-10 years.  Here at Yale our strong ethic of
preserving material in its original form once led us to send most of the
incoming stream of damaged items to Collection Care, directing only
exceptionally brittle items toward
selector review and reformatting.  There were two unfortunate results of
this practice;  some items were back in Preservation one or two
circulations after leaving Collection Care, and technicians in
Collection Care were boxing a fair amount of incoming material simply
because it was found to be too brittle to repair after all.  

Now all incoming material is checked for brittleness.  If the paper breaks
in one fold, the item is immediately set aside for selector review.  If the
paper holds out for two or three folds before breaking,
and the item is low use, it is returned to the stacks as long as both
boards are present and the text block is intact.  However, high use
material in the two or three fold category is also sent for selector
review.  Experience has shown us that while this material often can be
repaired, these repairs do not protect the embrittled text block from the
real world of photocopiers, book drops, and the contents of
backpacks.  Reformatting material at this stage eliminates what is in our
case an often long and costly search for missing pages.  

Personally I've never liked the "book coffin" approach to phase boxing.
Boxing is expensive for us due to higher than average labor costs so we now
concentrate our boxing efforts on material with intrinsic value.  These
revised triage guidelines seem to be a more appropriate balance between
preserving original material and keeping information available to our users.

David




David E. Walls
Preservation Librarian, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University