Tucked behind IU Health Bloomington Hospital, the Ruth Lilly Auxiliary Library Facility provides care to a very different type of patient: the 4.2 million books, documents, and records in the library’s collections.
The Auxiliary Library Facility smells—unsurprisingly—like books. It’s an earthy, sweet scent, with a tinge of adhesive. In the main workspace, a team of students and conservators lean over benches, reattaching the spines of books with almost surgical precision.
In the next room over, paper conservator Doug Sanders carefully inspects a photo album from 1870. His workspace is large and spread out with two tables in the middle and a circle of specialized instruments along the walls. “It’s kind of set up like a mix between an art studio and a chemistry lab,” said Sanders, gesturing to a cup of paintbrushes near the sink.
The combination makes sense for the type of work that Sanders does. Fraying maps, discolored manuscripts, and stained photos from IU’s collections all wind up here to be evaluated and treated. It’s behind-the-scenes work, often unfamiliar to users of the IU libraries, but crucial to extend the useful life of collections.
Stabilization, not ‘fixing’
The staff at the Auxiliary Library Facility is divided into four subunits: general collections conservation, bindery prep, boxing, and paper conservation. Sanders belongs to the last group: working to stabilize loose documents using a variety of scientific and artistic techniques.
“The key is this notion of reversibility and stabilization. Rather than bringing something back to a previous form, we try to stabilize,” said Sanders. Take, for example, the 1870’s photo album. The book’s spine has pulled away slightly from its pages, something Sanders plans to stabilize with tissue paper and wheat starch paste. “[The paste] is very reversible; it ages well, it doesn’t discolor much,” he explained.
The reasons for this approach are both scientific and social. On one hand, conservators tend to ensure that the mend is not stronger than the material they’re mending, otherwise it can strain the document and cause additional damage.
On the other hand, “we don’t like to change the way an artifact is viewed or interpreted,” said Sanders, “there’s quite a lot of thought now in the conservation field about diversity, bias, and equity. Conservators are reviewing the assumptions we make about what needs to be repaired and why we repair it, and who gets to decide that.” In Sanders’ daily work, this means using reversible adhesives like wheat starch paste instead of glue or encapsulation in inert films instead of permanent lamination.
Preventative maintenance
Most of what happens in Sanders’ laboratory is remedial maintenance, that is, preserving documents once they have already been damaged. But, explained the conservator, preventative care is just as important.
“Storage is chiefly about controlling temperature, light, and humidity. Each of those three factors can create and accelerate chemical reactions that can age our collections,” said Sanders. It’s no surprise, then, that the Auxiliary Library Facility has three sprawling warehouses to hold collections in precisely the best conditions for their preservation.
The storage facilities house over 4.2 million documents in an area of 89,721 square feet. Their 13-inch concrete walls block out sunlight and Bloomington weather, maintaining a precise 50º Fahrenheit and 35% relative humidity at all times.
A few dozen feet from the storage facilities, a machine the size of a king-sized bed cuts each box to custom-fit its contents. These unassuming cardboard cutouts are a conservator’s best friend. “Boxes allow us some buffer against rapid changes in humidity and temperature,” described Sanders. “Temperature has to heat the box up first before it can heat up the contents. Moisture has to soften a box first before its contents.”
With boxes as a first line of defense and remedial methods at the ready, the Auxiliary Library Facility is well prepared to safeguard IU’s collections.
Research efforts
In addition to these well-established methods, Sanders is researching new methods to preserve and understand historical documents.
One such project, done in collaboration with the Department of the History & Philosophy of Science & Medicine, and Professor Bill Newman, who does the primary research on Isaac Newton's work, uses analytical chemistry techniques to build a timeline of the polymath's work. Many of the physicist’s works are undated, but the type of ink used may offer insight into when they were created.
“Iron gall ink was the chief writing ink for many centuries, certainly during Newton's time in the 17th century,” explained Sanders. As its name suggests, the main ingredient of this ink is iron, though it was often mixed with tannic and gallic acids produced from organic matter such as oak galls. Sanders can use a technique called X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to find the unique energy signature of the variety of iron gall ink used on a particular document. Logic suggests that if the same ink formulation was used on two documents, it’s likely they were written around the same time. By comparing ink from undated documents to those of a known age, “we can create an artificial chronology or incremental sequencing based upon known and unknown,” suggested Sanders.
Although IU doesn’t currently hold any of Newton’s documents, so far, that group has done proof of concept tests using Lilly library’s Albeville collection: a series of letters from a similar date range and made of similar materials. “We're at a point now where we've shown that it does work. And so we'll be traveling to the Huntington Library outside of LA, hopefully in January, to work on their new manuscripts,” said Sanders.
For now, Sanders is focused on the task in front of him: preserving the photo album from 1870. A note found in the album explains it belonged to Madeline A. Thompson, the wife of Redick McKee Wylie, himself a son of Indiana University’s first President, Andrew Wylie. If Wylie could see the scientific rigor and artistic standards of the paper conservator’s work, he’d surely approve.
