[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
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shanaqui asked how the library might deal with an infestation of insects, but those are not the only way that material can be damaged in the course of either being on the shelves or in the hands of our users.
Books, at least, if they lose pages or leaves, used to be available with enough space in their gutter that if you really needed that book to stay together, you could send it out to someone (or do it in-house) for re-binding, which would shorten the book by about an inch, but it would have all of the leaves back together and be able to go back out for a few more circulations. These days, many books don't have the requisite space for re-binding, and the process and time involved in it makes it far more expensive to rebind something instead of re-buy it, assuming that the book itself is in print and readily available.
For discs, it's generally not possible to repair anything that's cracked or has bits missing, and if the disc itself is scratched, we have resurfacing machines that can be used, but even then, there's only a limited number of times a disc can be re-smoothed before the process has eaten its way completely through the disc and it has to be re-bought anyway.
These are ways that things can be damaged through normal wear and tear. There are also accidents that happen (or deliberate damage) where a person, or animal, gets a hold of the material and applies their strength in ways that tear bits out or off, snap discs, chew on books, spit up on them, or otherwise inflict damage by being the kind of person or animal they are to the books. Those, generally, are damaged beyond repair when they come back (except maybe a baby who was stopped before they could go to town on the book) and have to be discarded and re-bought.
And then there's disaster-class damage, which is what happens when liquid, fire, or other life forms happen to the materials. Fire is one of those things that people still think is funny to do to library materials in the library - anything not destroyed by the fire itself is likely to have smoke damage that will impregnate itself in the paper of the books. Books that read fine but smell like fire aren't the sort of thing a library wants on the shelves, especially for anyone who is sensitive to smoke and their lungs, but a mass-replacement budget is probably not going to happen unless the community rallies hard around getting the materials back on the shelves. The best thing to do in those cases is to try and get them to air out their smoke over time, and hope that they do. Discs, generally, get hurt by both fire and smoke, because they both damage the information pits on the disc.
Liquids are the most common things that happen to library materials. Discs shrug liquids off, for the most part, unless they're particularly acetic or basic, the kind that might etch or erase pits on the disc. Books, on the other hand, will happily soak up any liquid you give them, and then warp themselves even more gleefully as they dry themselves out - water damage causes a very consistent wrinkling, and often can provide an environment for other organisms, like mold or mildew, to grow on the book, and those things will spread to other books and damage them as well. The best way to avoid this is not to let it happen, but of course, water bottles aren't sealed properly, the rain shifts just enough to get inside, or your baby urinates on the container, or the book itself, and the matter is too far gone before anything can be done about it.
There's a video I got to see where the preservation department at Syracuse Libraries showed us how they keep a book together and work to make it better if it's been water-damaged. First thing is to try and wick out as much of the water as possible by applying paper towels to the book, to get the cover dry, then spaced about every 10-20 pages, working in quarters or halves of the book, gently pressing on the book while it is closed to get the water to leave the book's pages for the dry paper towels. Once that's done, fan out the pages and give them a gentle fan drying overnight. In the morning, put the book between two solid boards, and then apply weight to the top of the board to press the book back into shape. Wait a couple days with the press, and the book will probably be serviceable again. It will still display some signs of water damage, but at least the book itself won't become a puffy mess. What's most interesting about that video is that if you can't repair a wet book right away, stuff it in a sealable bag and throw the book in the freezer, which will arrest some of the damage that wet leaves can do.
Critters, however, are things that we need to make sure we don't give an opportunity to get into the collection, or the building. At one of my locations, I had made the remark that there was a rather rank smell passing through the portal into the meeting room. It wasn't anywhere else, just at that point. But our maintenance people came out, all the same, and discovered that the smell I was experiencing was that of rotting rat flesh. Eww. A different location had a dripping sprinkler head in the bathroom, courtesy of a different rodent that had climbed in a bit into the water line that was going to the sprinkler. Thankfully, so far we haven't had anything get in where it could go after material in the stacks, and if we spotted a thing, we generally laid down traps to attempt to capture the critter before it did serious damage.
( Specific mentions of bugs at this point, requested to be under cut )
If I worked more in preservation, this would likely be a topic I knew more about, as well as some fascinating stories about the material I've saved to this point. But the truth is, in public libraries, we're not really charged with preserving the rare and beautiful and one-of-a-kind. We're about getting things into people's hands, and occasionally, that means replacing what people have damaged.
shanaqui asked how the library might deal with an infestation of insects, but those are not the only way that material can be damaged in the course of either being on the shelves or in the hands of our users. Books, at least, if they lose pages or leaves, used to be available with enough space in their gutter that if you really needed that book to stay together, you could send it out to someone (or do it in-house) for re-binding, which would shorten the book by about an inch, but it would have all of the leaves back together and be able to go back out for a few more circulations. These days, many books don't have the requisite space for re-binding, and the process and time involved in it makes it far more expensive to rebind something instead of re-buy it, assuming that the book itself is in print and readily available.
For discs, it's generally not possible to repair anything that's cracked or has bits missing, and if the disc itself is scratched, we have resurfacing machines that can be used, but even then, there's only a limited number of times a disc can be re-smoothed before the process has eaten its way completely through the disc and it has to be re-bought anyway.
These are ways that things can be damaged through normal wear and tear. There are also accidents that happen (or deliberate damage) where a person, or animal, gets a hold of the material and applies their strength in ways that tear bits out or off, snap discs, chew on books, spit up on them, or otherwise inflict damage by being the kind of person or animal they are to the books. Those, generally, are damaged beyond repair when they come back (except maybe a baby who was stopped before they could go to town on the book) and have to be discarded and re-bought.
And then there's disaster-class damage, which is what happens when liquid, fire, or other life forms happen to the materials. Fire is one of those things that people still think is funny to do to library materials in the library - anything not destroyed by the fire itself is likely to have smoke damage that will impregnate itself in the paper of the books. Books that read fine but smell like fire aren't the sort of thing a library wants on the shelves, especially for anyone who is sensitive to smoke and their lungs, but a mass-replacement budget is probably not going to happen unless the community rallies hard around getting the materials back on the shelves. The best thing to do in those cases is to try and get them to air out their smoke over time, and hope that they do. Discs, generally, get hurt by both fire and smoke, because they both damage the information pits on the disc.
Liquids are the most common things that happen to library materials. Discs shrug liquids off, for the most part, unless they're particularly acetic or basic, the kind that might etch or erase pits on the disc. Books, on the other hand, will happily soak up any liquid you give them, and then warp themselves even more gleefully as they dry themselves out - water damage causes a very consistent wrinkling, and often can provide an environment for other organisms, like mold or mildew, to grow on the book, and those things will spread to other books and damage them as well. The best way to avoid this is not to let it happen, but of course, water bottles aren't sealed properly, the rain shifts just enough to get inside, or your baby urinates on the container, or the book itself, and the matter is too far gone before anything can be done about it.
There's a video I got to see where the preservation department at Syracuse Libraries showed us how they keep a book together and work to make it better if it's been water-damaged. First thing is to try and wick out as much of the water as possible by applying paper towels to the book, to get the cover dry, then spaced about every 10-20 pages, working in quarters or halves of the book, gently pressing on the book while it is closed to get the water to leave the book's pages for the dry paper towels. Once that's done, fan out the pages and give them a gentle fan drying overnight. In the morning, put the book between two solid boards, and then apply weight to the top of the board to press the book back into shape. Wait a couple days with the press, and the book will probably be serviceable again. It will still display some signs of water damage, but at least the book itself won't become a puffy mess. What's most interesting about that video is that if you can't repair a wet book right away, stuff it in a sealable bag and throw the book in the freezer, which will arrest some of the damage that wet leaves can do.
Critters, however, are things that we need to make sure we don't give an opportunity to get into the collection, or the building. At one of my locations, I had made the remark that there was a rather rank smell passing through the portal into the meeting room. It wasn't anywhere else, just at that point. But our maintenance people came out, all the same, and discovered that the smell I was experiencing was that of rotting rat flesh. Eww. A different location had a dripping sprinkler head in the bathroom, courtesy of a different rodent that had climbed in a bit into the water line that was going to the sprinkler. Thankfully, so far we haven't had anything get in where it could go after material in the stacks, and if we spotted a thing, we generally laid down traps to attempt to capture the critter before it did serious damage.
( Specific mentions of bugs at this point, requested to be under cut )
If I worked more in preservation, this would likely be a topic I knew more about, as well as some fascinating stories about the material I've saved to this point. But the truth is, in public libraries, we're not really charged with preserving the rare and beautiful and one-of-a-kind. We're about getting things into people's hands, and occasionally, that means replacing what people have damaged.
