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U.
S. Department of the Interior:
Save America's Treasures
Historic Preservation Fund Grants to Preserve Nationally Significant Intellectual
and Cultural Artifacts and Historic Structures and Sites
In 1999, the Cornell University Library received a $331,000 grant to conserve its extensive Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection. The grant was awarded through the "Save America's Treasures" initiative, a public-private partnership between the White House Millennium Council and National Trust for Historic Preservation, administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities, dedicated to the preservation of the nation's irreplaceable historic and cultural treasures. It was one of 62 projects funded nationwide in 1999, and one of only two awards made to libraries.
The May Anti-Slavery Collection is housed in a secure, environmentally controlled location, but it was threatened by acidity of the paper and iron gall ink used in some 19th century print runs. Some pamphlets had paper that is porous, indicating poor sizing, and many were stained and soiled through use and the absorption of pollutants over the last century. The grant provided funding for full conservation treatment to restore these items to a useable state for current and future scholars requiring access to the original artifacts. In addition the collection has been further protected by the creation of electronic surrogates that are being made broadly and comprehensively available via the World Wide Web. Although the digitized versions can reproduce the essential textual information contained in the original pamphlets, conservation treatment was justified because the intrinsic value of these vital cultural artifacts cannot be adequately conveyed in any other fashion, and the originals must be strengthened to support continued use. Full online cataloging of the entire collection enhanced access to both the original pamphlets and their digital surrogates.
Initially, the project cataloger entered the information from the original catalog cards for the Anti-Slavery Collection into Cornell's online catalog, allowing searching by standard terms and by keywords. Pamphlets were then sent to the Department of Preservation and Conservation where conservators preserved the essential characteristics of the pamphlets by returning them to pamphlet form, with each pamphlet protected by a stable and sympathetic paper cover. The pamphlets were dry-cleaned, thoroughly washed to remove soluble acids and stains, alkalized, repaired, and, where necessary, resized. They were then repaired, resewn, and protected by a paper cover, and boxed. Brittle pamphlets were stabilized, encapsulated and post-bound to return them to a useable state. Digitization occurred in tandem with conservation treatment (i.e. originals. The project has cataloged and digitized all items (300,000 pages) in a manner that protects the originals while ensuring full capture of the text, illustrations, annotations, markings, and embossments. Optical character scan (OCR) and encoding, will provide full-text searching of the digital images.
Copyright
© 2002 Division of Rare & Manuscript
Collections
2B Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853
Phone Number: (607) 255-3530. Fax Number: (607) 255-9524
For information about copyright issues and securing permission to publish digital reproductions of images from the Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection, please consult our Copyright & Permissions Page.
For
reference questions, send mail to:
rareref@cornell.edu
For questions or comments about the site, send mail to: webmaster.
