Kenneth Spencer Research Library

One of my favorite group of objects that has come to Conservation Services for housing is the Zodiac Club peanut doll collection, housed in the Kansas Collection. As the name implies, it is a series of dolls made from shelled peanuts for heads, with wire bodies and intricate, period-appropriate dress.

The Zodiac Club was founded as women’s studying group, organized on February 5, 1878, by nine women from the Lawrence, KS area. Over the years the club met in members’ homes every Tuesday to read and discuss items relating to “cultural improvement.”

In 1943, when the Zodiac Club celebrated its 65th anniversary, twelve dolls were made to represent the original members of the Zodiac Club. The dolls are made of a frame of covered wire with peanuts for faces and dressed in costumes from the 1870s. Besides the dolls, the collection includes miniature period furniture, as well as leather-bound books, a tea service, spinning wheel, tintype photographs, needlepoint, and braid rug.

Left: Zodiac Club doll collection before housing. Right: Examples of the other items housed with the dolls.
Kansas Collection, call number RH MS Q61.

All the dolls, furniture, and other items were wrapped in paper towels and placed together in a box, making it difficult to tell what was in the box and to access particular items. A museum studies student intern was assigned to rehouse the collection into a more usable form.

Peanut-headed doll wrapped in paper towel. Note the fine detail in the costume.
Kansas Collection, call number RH MS Q61.

I asked her to create a housing that would keep the dolls and the other items in one box. She devised an ingenious two-tray system: the furniture and other items that are less frequently accessed are on the bottom layer, and the dolls are in a removable tray on top. Featured on the outside and inside of the box is a diagram that indicates how everything fits in the housing. Now the peanut ladies will be better protected and more easily displayed for many years to come.

Left: Top tray with dolls and housing guide. Right: Bottom tray with furniture and other items.
Kansas Collection, call number RH MS Q61.

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services

Conservation Services students and staff have housed a wide variety of objects from the University Archives in the past few years. Each object presents its own challenges, but we try to keep a few things in mind: 1) It must be easy for a patron to remove the object safely from the box, 2) any paperwork that accompanies the object should be stored in a pocket in the box lid, and 3) a color image of the item should be affixed to the outside of the box to aid staff in locating the correct item without having to open every box.

Please enjoy a few of our favorite recent housings.

Left: Metal Jayhawk broken at neck, housed in original orientation with support for the broken area.
Right: Ceramic Jayhawk whiskey bottle. Call numbers: 0/25. University Archives. Click images to enlarge.

Left: Chancellor Snow’s pocket watch with winding key. Call number: 2/6/6.
Right: Professor L.L. Dyche’s compass and measuring tape. Call number: 41/0. University Archives. Click images to enlarge.

Seal of the University of Kansas. Call number: 0/30. University Archives. Click image to enlarge.

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services

Conservation Services has system-wide responsibilities, but an increasing focus is on Spencer Library materials and collections. There are two main conservation workspaces: a full-fledged conservation lab in Watson Library and workroom in Spencer Library. In this post, we feature the Stannard Conservation Lab.

KU Libraries has had a book bindery/mendery from at least the 1960s, located in the basement of Watson Library. The image below shows the woman on the left sewing a book on a sewing frame, and other staff standing by books batched for case binding.

View of University of Kansas bindery, before 1965, located in the basement of Watson Library.

As part of the drive in American research libraries in the 1980s and 1990s to build conservation laboratories to serve a wider range of collection needs, in 1994 the Libraries organized a Preservation Department and recruited Brian Baird as the first Preservation Librarian. Almost immediately, he began to plan, build, staff, and equip a modern conservation laboratory. These efforts came to fruition in 1997 with three major events: Meg Brown was appointed as the Libraries’ first full-time conservator; a renovation project was completed on the ground floor of Watson Library to create contiguous working space for the Preservation Department; and funds were raised from private donors to equip the facility.

Two views of the Stannard Lab, looking west (left image) and east (right image).

On March 19, 1998, the University of Kansas Libraries dedicated the Jerry and Katherine Stannard Conservation Laboratory and paid tribute to Jerry and Katherine Stannard, the Southwestern Bell Foundation, the Ethel and Raymond F. Rice Foundation, the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation, the Lawrence Walmart Green Team, and Kathryn Davis for their generous gifts that made it possible to equip the Stannard Laboratory. At the dedication, Erica Stannard-Schenk, Jerry and Katherine’s daughter, unveiled a beautiful quilt that is now on permanent display in the entrance of the laboratory.

View of the storeroom outside the Stannard Lab.

In 2011, the department was renamed Conservation Services. A second space in Spencer Library was acquired to take care of simple treatments on site, so as to reduce the transportation of rare materials from one library to another. The department’s focus continues to evolve, but we pay tribute to the events that brought us to where we are today.

Whitney Baker (using some text written by Brian Baird)
Head, Conservation Services

Taking our cue from a 2009 Conserve-O-Gram (a free resource published by the National Park Service) titled “Flag Rolling and Storage,” staff in Conservation Services created an inexpensive and accessible textile storage system. The University of Kansas class and school banners are part of the collection materials found in University Archives. These banners are an important part of the history of the commencement ceremony at the university. The banners are visually interesting and also instructive artifacts as markers of KU’s changing awareness of brand identity.

1964 KU class banner, used in graduation ceremonies

After photographing each banner, staff carefully rolled each item around an pH-neutral cardboard core.

Rolling a class banner on a core.

The rolling process began with a tissue paper-liner and ended with a cover of cotton muslin. Each cover was tied into place just beyond the edges of the banner and identified with a small tag showing an image of the item inside as well as its call number.

Left: Visual identification tag for 1964 class banner. Right: Many rolled items, ready for hanging.

There are several advantages to rolling textiles for long-term storage. There are no folds made in the fabric, reducing stress on the fibers and limiting the creation of breaks and tears. Each textile can be removed independently of the others (unlike housing several textiles in a single box) thus decreasing the number of times all the objects must be handled. And because hanging storage is vertically oriented, it takes up less space than shelves or drawers, and can be fitted on an unused wall or into an aisle.

Detail of hanging mechanism.

Once staff completed the rolling process, empty shelves were removed from two ranges in the Spencer stacks. A durable, link-style chain was suspended from the overhead shelving beams and secured into place using locking bolts. Metal electrical conduit was cut to the proper length and passed through the center of the cardboard tubes. S-hooks were hung at intervals along the chain to support the rolls.  The resulting storage has a slim profile, and provides quick and easy access to the collection materials.

Overall view of rolled textile storage.

Roberta Woodrick
Assistant Conservator
Conservation Services

An unused stretch of wall space on the first floor of Spencer has become the new home to about fifty paintings formerly housed in the Kansas Collection and University Archives stacks. Following a visit to the collection storage area at the Spencer Museum of Art, Conservation Services staff installed a similar gridwall panel system.

.   

Left: Wall space for hanging storage. Right: Installation of gridwall panels.

The panels are much like ones found in retail stores for displaying merchandise. They come in a variety of lengths and widths, which make them very adaptable to the existing environment in which they are placed. The walls on which the panels were mounted were a bit less cooperative, as evidenced by the number and wear on the bits used in drilling process.

Large collection of drill bits used during the installation process.

Staff first attached painted wooden boards to the wall to reinforce the plaster surface. This also ensured that the hooks used for hanging the gridwall panels could be accurately fixed in place.

Installed gridwall panels.

Once the installation was complete, staff fastened d-ring hangers with short, pan-head wood screws to the frames or stretcher bars on the verso of the paintings. Although a few of the paintings were already equipped with hooks and wires, it was deemed more secure and stable to use the d-ring hangers for hanging on the panels. The use of a d-ring on each side of the frame/stretcher bar allows the painting to be hung from a pair of hooks. In this manner, the painting will not slide from side to side as it would when hung on a wire over a single hanger.

Left: Attaching d-rings to painting stretcher bar. Right: Painting with d-ring attached to hook, then to panel.

The paintings were then arranged salon-style, using the panel space as efficiently as possible. The paintings are now much easier to page for patrons. This is also a better storage environment for the items, as they are no longer standing on one side of their frame/stretcher bar or resting against one another.

Left: Paintings hung in place. Right: Tyvek drapery to protect paintings from dust and light.

As a final preservation strategy, the paintings have been draped in Tyvek. This material, best known for its application in house construction, is an excellent, light-weight covering to protect the paintings from dust and abrasion. In addition, we created a visual map of all the paintings to aid in paging them for patrons with the least disruption to the Tyvek drapery.

Roberta Woodrick
Assistant Conservator
Conservation Services