Sender: Rare book and manuscripts <EXLIBRIS-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU>
This appeared in the Post Gazette. One interesting aspect of the new
library is that they seemed to have banned traditional writing instruments
entirely from the reading room. --ECW
State library's new wing slows aging of old documents
Sunday, March 09, 2008
By Tracie Mauriello, Post-Gazette Harrisburg Bureau
Brady C. Bower for the Post-Gazette
HARRISBURG -- Paper booties, cotton smocks and blue latex gloves are de
rigeur in the austere and darkened corridors, where hidden cameras, key-card
readers and fingerprint scanners track every movement.
A filtration system removes harmful gases from the air. Sensors detect
chemical changes as subtle as new colognes worn by the small cadre of
personnel authorized to enter the innermost sanctum.
This isn't a scene from "The Matrix." There are no secrets being guarded
here, rather documents that the curators want you to see.
This is the new $7.2 million Rare Collections wing of the Pennsylvania State
Library.
After two years of design and two years of construction, the wing now is
being filled with 12,000 of the state's oldest and most valuable holdings,
including Ben Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanacs" and a well-worn copy of
the Magna Carta that the founding fathers referred to during the Continental
Congress as they drafted the U.S. Constitution.
In six months, the wing will be ready for scholars and researchers who come
from all corners of the state and, recently, as far as Japan to view the
state's collection of historical documents.
The documents will be available to the public, too.
"Our purpose is to make documents available to serious researchers and
students, but we had a limited capacity to make them available to the
public. Now, because we can protect them, we can make them known," said
Caryn Carr, director of the Pennsylvania State Library. "Now we can make
them available to greater numbers."
There is a 1739 ceremonial Bible that the Pennsylvania General Assembly used
in its earliest days. There is a 1795 map of Harrisburg hand-drawn on animal
skin. There a copy of the 1752 newspaper in which Benjamin Franklin first
described his kite-and-key experiment that resulted in the discovery of
electricity.
The collection also includes agricultural pamphlets, musical scores,
ornithology books and religious texts, including the German Saur Bible, the
first non-English-language Bible printed in the colonies.
For the oldest volumes, the relocation to the collections wing will be their
12th move since in 1777.
Thought to be a target of British soldiers in the Revolutionary War, 425
volumes were taken at night from Philadelphia to a hay barn in Easton for
safekeeping, said Mary Clare Zales, the state Department of Education's
deputy director for libraries. All but two of those volumes survived war,
fire, flood and neglect, she said.
Most recently, these rare books and thousands like them were being stored in
the library stacks alongside modern volumes that are printed by the millions
instead of by the dozens. Centuries-old documents were stored on metal
shelves in a room with peeling paint, dusty curtains and florescent lights
known to cause paper to disintegrate.
"They are in a much better environment now, much better," Ms. Carr said.
Thousands of books, pamphlets, maps and newspapers have been moved to the
new environmentally controlled area already, and library employees are
transporting the rest one bookcart at a time from the library stacks to the
renovated 18,000-square-foot wing that used to house card catalogs, meeting
rooms and administrative offices.
The area includes an elegant reading room with Venetian plaster walls,
stained-glass depictions of Franklin and granite floors and tabletops that
reflect and amplify light, which is kept at low levels to better preserve
documents. The room is framed on three sides by Pennsylvania black cherry
wood, which came from trees hand picked by project architect Cornelius
Rosnov, of the state Department of General Services. The fourth side
comprises plaster tryptychs depicting figures from Greek mythology.
No pens or pencils are allowed here, lest graphite dust and stray ink mar
its treasures. Instead, patrons can use laptop computers to take notes. The
reading room is the only elaborately decorated part of the wing. It was
designed with people in mind, while the rest of the vault is aimed not at
creature comforts, but at book preservation. Translation: It is dim and
cool.
Out of that darkness will come new light shed on the state's past as the
library provides greater access to the treasures of William Penn's time.
"This is really going to help us elevate the discourse about that time
period," Ms. Zales said.
The high-tech environment is the only one of its kind in Pennsylvania, and
already is becoming a model for other states. It was designed by a team of
architects, engineers, chemists, physicists, historians, librarians and
paper-preservation specialists.
"We are showing that we can produce an appropriate environment to preserve
books despite the climate inside," Mr. Rusnov said. "It is a model project
that other libraries could learn from."
Paper and other artifacts cannot be stopped from deteriorating, but Mr.
Rusnov believes he has created the perfect environment to slow the process.
"These things are going to continue to deteriorate naturally. They are going
to rot," he said. "We can't stop the process, but we can extend the life of
these materials until technology catches up and can extend it again."