Funding, Funding, Funding: Highlights of the 1989 Survey

 

These are my notes from reading the 1989 Brittle Book Survey. What is most striking is the need for preservation of the Judaica Collection. Reading the survey, it sounds like our committee might want to reform as the “Preserve the brittle Judaica Collection Taskforce.”

 

“Materials held in Judaica should be given first priority, embrittlement is nearly three times the average.” Unlike many of the collections where environmental control is a solution, lots of the Judaica materials have poor paper and use animal glues so even good environmental control wouldn’t stop embrittlement so these will be worse and are in critical need.

 

The survey mentioned, apply for NEH Preservation for:

  1. Judaica:  Before there were cataloging problems, now minimal but still needs more help? Granting agencies didn’t want duplicated efforts from different places, so needs to be collaborative.  
  2. Latin American
  3. African Collection
  4. Baldwin
  5. Florida History (PK Yonge with public interest; ready reference materials for LSTA for digital reference)
  6. Asian Collection
  7. All others: Defined by collection managers (Map Library, Florida Government Documents, AFA: terminal projects like MKR book for LSTA)

 

The LSTA grant application page grant application page hasn't been updated, but it looks like grant applications are normally due in March, so this would be a great one to go for.

Other Recommendations

  • Preservation tried 14 times to bring CMs in to the process. Collection management may need to shift more toward maintenance (maybe shift off of reference desk or other duties to free their time).
  • Review and revise what years are automatically transferred to Special Collections on a discipline basis.
  • Funding, funding, funding.

 

Details

 

Cathy had asked for more info so here they are (and there are loads more in the survey!):

The survey doesn't have a simple percentage of brittle because it’s accurately detailed on what’s brittle and how brittle, so it goes into brittle percentages for degree of brittleness (DFT 0, 3,5, going to be one of those soon) and by collection. At the time of the survey 81% of the Baldwin books were brittle at dft 2.3. Many of those have been digitized, they’re now in better stacks/better environment, but they still need more grants for digitization. The PKY library had 80% brittle microfilm, but that’s okay because Erich fixed it with grants. Government docs had been non-circulation and then weren’t and this survey was too early in that change to address how brittle they’d become and how quickly it would happen, so that’s a big unknown. A lot of the books may have been weeded (a lot were paper-journals which would now be bound or electronic) so the percentages are weird.

 

Page 14 has this information:

If the UFL collections include 2,700,000 volumes then, excluding continuing embrittlement, and at a processing rate of ~ 2,500 vol.:

~ dft = 0 .............. 37,530 vol. embrittled ........ 15 years

Page 16 has this:

Not less than 12.9% and not more than 19.6% of all collections are currently embrittled. These findings are significantly lower than those of Yale University Libraries and other, primarily northeastern libraries which have reported embrittlement to represent between 25% and 35% of collections. Current UFL figures do not significantly differ from findings of 1985 physical condition survey which found between l0% and 17% embrittlement for collections.

• Averages: dft < 3 average is 12.92%; dft < average is 15.17%; and dft < 5 average is 15.17%.

 

Page 17:

The average percentage of brittle materials in collections at dft = 0, the criteria currently used for protective removal of volumes from circulation and placement in the Brittle Books Program backlog for most immediate attention, is 1.39%.

 

Page 24 shows that embrittlement disproportionately affects different areas based on the publishing years for books in the collections:

The most severely embrittled materials were published between 1851 and 1920. Embrittlement of materials from this period ranges from 3 to over 16 times more brittle than the average. Nineteenth century materials and collections. such as those held by the Baldwin Library are at extreme risk.

This is the same issue for Judaica, but nothing has been done to help it.

Page 13 tells more about Judaica:

The following collections fall into these extreme categories li.e., dft < 1 is at or above average} Iranked list beginning with most endangered:

Price Library of Judaica…[others that have had grants so order has changed and is reflected in the other writeup] Materials held in Judaica should be given first priority, embrittlement is nearly three times the average.

 

I went over the recommendations from the survey with Erich and that was the basis for the current recommendations based on the old survey. Without other surveys, we won’t know embrittlement for many of the collections because they’d had better treatement/preservation work, better environmental controls, been weeded, been digitized, are only digital, aren’t ever used. The only areas we know for certain that need preservation work immediately are those that were bad-off enough and did not receive help and weren’t weeded and are still used or wanted. From these concerns, Judaica is the most in need, followed by the others on the list above.


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