ALA ~ Preservation Products and Services

At the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco, I talked to several vendors on the exhibit floor that were offering preservation products and services. Here I will discuss four: T&D data loggers, Brodart, Azuradisc, and Digital Revolution. I was very impressed by the wide presence of vendors offering preservation products and services at ALA.

T&D

Promo Materials from T&D 

I saw an ad for T&D data loggers in the ALA Program and Exhibit Directory, so I made it a point to stop by the last day the exhibit hall was open. If there was ever such a thing as a library worker Christmas list, I would have a data logger on it -- temperature and RH are not routinely measured for the general and reference print collections at my library, so it would be interesting (just for fun) to see how much these conditions fluctuate for both. Furthermore, I will be conducting a survey about study zones in the fall at my library, so I was interested to see if data loggers exist to measure sound (decibels).

I found out T&D data loggers measure very important conditions for libraries, museums, and archives (temperature, RH, luminescence/UV, CO2), as well as conditions germane to other industries (instrumentation signals, location information for transport, pulse signals, voltage). Additionally, T&D's advanced systems can communicate data wirelessly, making collecting and charting the data directly automated to a PC. The wireless or wired data loggers can also trigger alarms, emails, and other notifications in the event a pre-set threshold is surpassed.

Unfortunately T&D do not offer data loggers for decibels, but I had a good chat with the representative about possible avenues to follow to that end.

Brodart

Brodart Guide to Book Care and Collection obtained from their booth at ALA 

Brodart is a company ubiquitous to the library community in all the library-related products they sell, including furniture, book carts, and signage. Brodart also offers book repair materials as well as a range of archival products such as boxes, files, shelving, sleeves, etc.

I picked up the Brodart Guide to Book Care and Repair at their booth, and the representative scanned my conference tag to send me a archival products catalog at a later date.

The Brodart Guide to Book Care and Repair is like a similar guide I got from Demco, which I used extensively for a Reference Collection survey and mending project I completed some years ago at my library. Looking over the Brodart guide, I surmise the techniques outlined are geared for general circulating collections primarily at public libraries, and are aimed at prolonging the circulation of the materials rather than preserving them in an archival sense. These types of guides are big on using tape and other quick, cheap methods of reinforcement and repair, and they do not always jibe with my training in archival preservation and book arts. Besides using binding tape when repairing spines of circulating books, I always defer to PVA glue rather than tape, and defer to a nipping press rather than a four sided rubber band for pressing.

However, the Brodart guide does do a good job of covering the basics of repairing hinges and spines that uphold the tenets of library bindings, as well as covering the terminology of book parts and other book repair and care terms. It's definitely a good starting place for novices and those on a tight budget.

Azuradisc

Azuradisc coupon for free disc repair and catalog obtained from their booth at ALA 

Azuradisc is one of several vendors that offer disc repair services that are valuable for the preservation of audio CDs, DVDs, BlueRay discs, and CD-Roms. The Azuradisc representative demonstrated the repair machine by scratching up a CD, putting a solution on it, then placing it in the machine which buffs out the scratches and makes the surface appear to be smooth as brand new. I see this as being very valuable to many types of institutions -- circulating disc collections in public and academic libraries as well as archives and special collections that are processing or preserving CD collections. A disc may be scratched upon ingestion, but with the repair like this, it will be able to be played successfully in the future, as well as reformatted without quality loss.

Azuradisc also offer other disc solutions, such as scratch guards for the foil layer (beneath the label), jewel case liners, microfiber optical cloths, spray cleaning, optical combo kits, and dual strip security labels. Lastly, they offer a mail-in service as well, in the event it is more cost effective to go that route rather than purchasing a disc cleaning machine.

Azuradisc makes their machines in the USA, in Arizona, which is great because I value that. While I did not speak to reps from other disc repair companies, I am not sure they can say their machines are made in USA as well.

Digital Revolution Media Preservation Services 

Digital Revolution promo packet obtained from their booth at ALA. It contains the article "Jean Sequencing" from the Society of California Archivists Newsletter, a handout called "Your history is important: Your media library is deteriorating • rescue it before it's too late," a handout called "Triage and your tape collection: Assessing magnetic tapes," an overview and workflow of Digital Revolution's media preservation services, and a reprint of a SF Chronicle article about Digital Revolution's project digitizing City Arts & Lectures recordings for the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

I happened across the Digital Revolution booth on Friday evening (June 26), which was great synchronicity with Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) workshop I had just attended and the Photographic Preservation class I am taking during this summer term. Digital Revolution is a San Francisco company that offers preservation and archiving services across the board -- from digitizing magnetic tape formats, to assisting in project management of archiving and digitization initiatives, to photographing and creating metadata for unique collections such as ephemera and clothing. It was really fun and exciting to talk to these reps!

I mentioned the AMIA workshop I had attended, and specifically discussed the portion of the workshop that dealt with managing outsourcing projects. The rep agreed that the things we had learned in the workshop are helpful, such as documenting the format, length, and number of video tapes in the digitization project, as well as specifying other aspects of the deliverables, such as file naming conventions and the way digital files will be transmitted back to the institution. Digital Revolution's guide to triaging magnetic tape collections that I obtained from their booth offered information in line with that I had learned in the workshop, such as the most at risk formats, how they deteriorate, optimal storage conditions, the pressing need to digitize these collections, and the difficulty obtaining and maintaining native playback equipment. I mentioned BVAC to the rep, as a BVAC employee had presented at the AMIA workshops. The Digital Revolution rep was very honest in his opinions of BVAC, and it was funny and interesting to see a different perspective of BVAC, and get a bit of dirt on the competitive nature of the local SF digitization companies.

Digital Revolution counts many California and Bay area organizations and companies as their clients: UC Berkeley, AAA, Chevron, NASA, Charles Schwab, The North Face, Del Monte, Disney Films, Wired Magazine, Chapman University, Gap, and City Arts & Lectures. Most interestingly, Digital Revolution worked with the Levi Strauss & Co. historian and archivists on a major project of creating a digital asset management system (DAM), the digital assets themselves, and the accompanying metadata. The digital archive contained thousands of images of the company's garments from the past 140 years, original wet plate collodion negatives (many of which had cracked), and physical artifacts like point-of-purchase displays, catalogs, historic books, and manuscripts. The Digital Revolution Rep said that working with the Levi Strauss & Co. archivist was very cool, because with each garment, she started telling stories about the clothing, its provenance, its history, and personal stories as well. I asked him if they also captured that as an oral history, and he said they did the best they could to translate her stories into useful metadata, but they did not record her talking. The Society of California Archivist's Newsletter ran a detailed article on the process in its Spring 2015 issue called "Jean Sequencing" that I recommend checking out.