Preserving our collection
Part 2. Preserving. In a previous blog post, I described Collecting. Now to the job of preserving what we have.
How much do you really want to know? This is boring but important stuff.
A bit of background. Many small towns have small historical societies in quaint, white historic buildings as people expect in New England. No heat or they can’t afford heat so the buildings are only open from June to October.
Our neighbors to the north and south do a better job. Rye has a quaint, white Rye Historical Society building that is open for a couple of hours each week year round and a couple of hours on weekends from May to October. Hampton Historical Society’s Tuck Museum closes for the months of January and February but otherwise is open some days and hours each week. The Town of North Hampton has never had a cute building to hand over to/ palm off on the local historical society. I may be the only person in town or in the Historical Society that says, “Yay!”
The Town stepped up almost twenty years ago when the Library ran out of space and more or less evicted the Historical Society from the New Hampshire Room. Its new homes became Priscilla Leavitt’s house, George Chauncey’s barn, the Town’s original library (stone) building, and the Town’s “temporary” space above the Police Station. Programs were held at the UCC Church or Town Hall.
After the positions of Town Clerk and Tax Collector were combined, the area in the stone building that for a few years had been the Tax Collector’s Office became the Heritage Commission conference room. The Commission shared the cost of purchasing exhibit cases with the Historical Society so that at the north end, away from the sunlight streaming in the windows, there could be a small exhibit area to display a portion of the Society’s collection.
The Town also provided space above the Police Station, and the Society purchased appropriate steel shelving to house its collection in a locked room, pretty much an oversized closet. Then, when the room became someone’s office, the collection moved to the storage room where some of the town’s records and other stuff resides. The Society built a wood and chicken wire cage that could be locked and that’s where all but the largest artifacts in the collection now reside.
Why do I say “yay”? It’s the best space of all in any of the Town-owned buildings. Fire and flood are the two most common risks to collections. This is the only Town-owned building that has a fire suppression system, a dry-pipe sprinkler system at that. It also is located on the second floor, not a damp basement prone to flooding. There are no adjacent restrooms. None of the steel shelving is against an exterior wall.
Who would have guessed? As you may have surmised, the most effective and least costly means of preserving historical materials, all materials, is to provide a benign environment. Start with moderate ranges of temperature and humidity. Heat and air conditioning sure help with those. Avoid attics, basements, exterior walls. Avoid sunlight or artificial light that emits ultraviolet radiation such as fluorescent lighting. LED is good even if it might make your face look ghastly in the mirror.
The space above the Police Station where Town Offices “temporarily” resides may not be pretty but it gets the job done so we can get our job done.
The Historical Society has all types of materials, some of which need TLC. Paper based materials and textiles go into archival quality enclosures - boxes, folders, paper, tissue. A lot of scrapbooking and office supplies now say “archival” or “acid-free” on their labels. What do they mean and what do we mean? The simple answer is “who knows?” what they mean. It’s like food products labeled “all-natural” or “organic”. Unless there are some standards listed, the consumer cannot tell.
If you look at the online catalogs of an archival supplies vendor, HollingerMetal Edge, Conservation Resources, Gaylord Archival, University Products are well-known, you’ll be inundated with information. For a non-profit’s advice, turn to Northeast Document Conservation Center’s website. https://www.nedcc.org
Preservation supplies all cost money. As far as I know, only one donor has provided funds to the Historical Society for the preservation of the donor’s family records. The membership brochure and now this website gives estimates of the supplies and programs costs- perhaps we should be more up front about our costs of doing business.
In some cases, to preserve the information or image, reformatting is the way to go. Reformatting can be as simple as photocopying a newspaper clipping and discarding the original. Nowadays, digitization can be an excellent preservation tool if (those words again) certain standards and guidelines are followed.
For digitization of typed documents Optical Character Recognition [OCR] software will enable them to be searchable; for newspapers and other documents larger than letter or legal size paper, a large format flatbed scanner is required. Color photographs, depending upon the original process, dyes, and environmental conditions, also are prime digitization candidates. Unlike news clippings, one keeps the originals of unique textual and photographic materials. Digitization is for access, making the information more widely available, and reducing the handling of the originals. After all, the long-term preservation of digital materials is a nut no one has seemed to crack yet. Emulation, migration every few years, anyone?