[PADG:1040] Re: Book Preservation Article in Johns Hopkins Magazine

["Robert J. Milevski" <milevski@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In looking at the lead photo from this article, it is obvious the problem
libraries face in gaining bibliographic control of their collections and
getting them listed online for users to discover and access.  I
refer to the placement of barcodes on the covers of patently brittle
materials.  (I do not doubt that the brittle books seen in the photo
were obviously brittle to the person doing  the barcoding, even if
done 10-20 years ago.  Here I ignore policy, communication and
production issues that mitigate decisions to barcode book covers.) 
There is also the problem of barcoding small books, where the bar code
becomes the significant feature of the cover, rather than what may have
been printed on the cover; in the case of the photo, printed paper
covers.  And finally, I personally object, as a binding historian,
to barcoding the covers of historical bindings; that is, at this time,
those prior to the 20th century, especially stamped publishers'
bindings.  

At Princeton, these barcoding problems became painfully apparent
recently.  We will be transferring the entire contents of one old
offsite storage facility to a new one with vastly improved environmental
and inventory controls.  The older facility contains over 700,000
items, all general collections, none special collections, and at least
1/4 are from the 19th century and earlier.  Many in this subset are
not in the greatest condition and nearly all have never been
barcoded.  There are also thousands of books less than six inches
tall.  (We call them 'smalls.')  Barcoding the covers of 19th
century stamped bindings is anathema to me, from both a professional
(preservation) and personal point of view.  I managed to convince
our technical services folk that we cannot barcode the covers of these
bindings, even though a barcode must be linked to every item. 
(Especially the smalls, some of which are miniature books, only inches
tall and wide, that are not candidates for special collections.  The
barcode would cover nearly 25% of the cover and could not be placed
horizontally because of being too narrow.)  Rather, we will band
them with polyethylene strips, attach the barcodes to the strips, and
then bag the volumes in polyethylene.  This will take more time, but
little used material will not be defaced, and will actually be protected
and preserved.  (I did have to give some ground on some material,
primarily quartos and folios.)

It is not hard to feel that preservation has been co-opted by technology
and bibliographic control of collections, that preservation has taken a
back seat to access.  

Robert

  At 01:33 PM 6/6/06, you wrote:
> Hi
> Thanks for passing along this great snippet -- I did Google and the
> article is  available at:
>
> http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0606web/preserve.html
>
> Karen
> Mokrzycki



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Robert J. Milevski
Princeton University Library
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Princeton, NJ 08544
(609) 258-5591
Fax:  (609) 258-4105
Email:  milevski@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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