Volume 26, Number 3
Nov 2002

Good News Department

• An encrypted Norwegian database holding a catalog of 11,000 books and manuscripts that had been inaccessible for nine years was opened June 10 within five hours of a cyber-Mayday issued by the repository library. The Ivar Aasen Center for Language and Culture posted a request for hacker assistance in accessing the catalog of the materials obtained from the family of Reidar Djupedal, an expert on Ivar Aasen.

  Nine years ago, an unidentified archivist transferred the catalog to dBase-formatted files and sent them to the center, together with the analog collection. Before they arrived, however, the archivist died without telling anyone the password.

  The librarians consulted computer experts for a while without success. Finally they sent out their Mayday message, which brought them 100 replies to their online appeal. Apparently they were all identical and correct. It was ladepujd, which is Djupedal spelled backwards. [Story condensed from American Libraries, Aug. 2002, p. 34.]

• Last year, BBC News Online announced that the British Library was coordinating a pan-European project that would allow Internet users to access digital and other collections from institutions across the continent. A 30-month project involving eight European libraries will provide the basis of the service. Libraries in Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom are all collaborating on the initiative. The ultimate aim is to create a virtual European library that can be accessed across the world. Funding for the European Library (TEL) project will be boosted by £740,000 from the European Commission's Information Societies Technology (IST) research program. [Announced in the AMIA Newsletter #54, Fall 2001, p.22.]

• David B. Gracy II, Director of the Center for the Cultural Record at the University of Texas at Austin, announced September 30 that the Preservation and Conservation Studies Program was celebrating 20 years of educating preservation administrators and conservators for libraries and archives (counting the first years at Columbia University).

  In addition to book and paper conservation and preservation administration, a series of courses have been developed on digital preservation, audio preservation, and digital reformatting; and the National Endowment for the Humanities recently and generously has continued its support of the program.

  For current information on staffing and curriculum, visit the program's website, <http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/programs/pcs>.

• Marshall University Library plans to set up West Virginia's first preservation lab. Thanks to a combination of grants and a tax on hotels and motels, Marshall University Library, Huntington, WV, will soon have what no one else in the state can claim: a preservation lab. Officials at Marshall say the lab could be used to preserve historical documents, photos, books and other artifacts belonging to the library.

  The lab came a step closer to reality recently after a Cabell County Commission moved to give the libraries additional funds for training, which will be combined with existing grants to send Marshall's special collections librarian Kathleen Bledsoe to Rutgers University for training sessions. According to Barbara Winters, the dean of libraries, they want to be a resource for the whole community.

• The House of Representatives' Administrative Committee has approved a proposal by Clerk of the House Jeff Trandahl to create an Office of History and Preservation. The establishment of the office is another step in Trandahl's quiet yet persistent effort to rebuild the Clerk of the House's capabilities in historical and archival activities that were abolished in 1995 by Speaker Newt Gingrich.

  Under the reorganization, an eight-person office will provide archival services and courtesy consultations for members of the House, and attend to public inquiries. In addition, Trandahl envisions that the revamped office will provide curatorial services in support of the Clerk's responsibilities to the House Fine Arts Board, which oversees the House art collection. With the creation of the Capitol Visitor Center, it is also anticipated that demands on the maintenance of the House collections of historical records will increase.

• Two years of research in Europe on Development of Archival Quality Leather were completed last year. Tanners, bookbinders and research groups from Europe worked together to reach their major objectives:
  1. Evaluation of leathers currently used for bookbinding across Europe.
  2. To develop leather quality tests that define binders' requirements in an objective manner understood by both the tanner and the binder.
  3. Optimization of semi-metal tannage, whereby a leather with all the required properties could be produced with a life expectancy of twice the normal life of the vegetable tanned leather stored in polluted atmospheres.
  4. To investigate the applicability of innovative "metal-free" tannery processes to consistently produce archival quality tannages.

  Seventy-two modern European bookbinding leathers were graded from zero to four on feel and handle, and on their physical and chemical properties. Full details can be seen at <http://www.hewit.com/sd12-leat.htm>.