Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Today, Friday, November 1, 2024, is the fifth annual Ask a Conservator Day, an initiative of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC), the national professional organization for conservators.

Ask a Conservator Day serves a dual purpose. First, it commemorates the flooding of Florence on November 4, 1966, which damaged cultural heritage sites throughout that city and, in the aftermath of the disaster, sparked a massive recovery effort that is seen as the origin of the modern conservation profession. Ask a Conservator Day also serves as an opportunity for conservators and other preservation professionals to educate the public about the conservation profession.

In that spirit, I will revive our occasional Today in the Lab series to share a snapshot of what I am working on right now. The materials at my workbench always represent an ever-changing mixture of long-term projects and one-off treatments with a shorter turnaround time, and at any given time I will have items from all of Spencer’s collecting areas in my queue. So come along on a tour of my workspace!

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First, on the green book truck next to my bench I have a group of recently catalogued children’s books from Special Collections, mostly from the 19^th century. As my colleagues in cataloging complete their work on the records for these materials, they flag volumes that need repair or housing. Our team of Conservation Services student assistants have already made custom enclosures to protect these vulnerable books, and I have been working through the flagged items in batches to complete any needed repairs.

Next, I have several sets of architectural drawings for Watson Library, which is having its centennial this year. These sets are for the original 1922-1924 construction and a 1940’s addition, a total of 116 individual drawings. These drawings bear signs of being used on the construction site: edge tears and creases from frequent rolling and unrolling, builders’ markings in pencil and other media, and a significant accumulation of surface dirt. One by one I have been surface cleaning the drawings on both sides, flattening the creases, and mending the tears with a specially made repair tissue. Just 6 more drawings to go before these sets will be returned to the University Archives, where they will be available once again to researchers.

Moving on to my cabinet! Right now the upper section of my cabinet mostly holds materials that I have prepared for an upcoming temporary exhibit. I have made cradles or selected other supports from our supply of exhibit materials, and for now these items are simply waiting for the installation date. On the lower shelf, second from the right, is a very long-term treatment that is in progress, an early 20^th century funeral ledger from the Kansas Collection. I have removed duct tape from the spine of the volume and have mended about half of the text block. When mending is completed, I will reinforce the sewing and board attachments so that this fascinating volume will be stable enough for use in the reading room.

Finally, in two of my lower cabinet drawers I have items awaiting treatment that have come to me either from cataloging and processing, or from the reading room. These are typical of the single-item treatments that make up the bulk of my daily work: items needing custom enclosures, volumes with detached spines or boards, rolled material that needs to be flattened, photographs that need to be removed from frames. This steady stream of “patients” is what keeps my day-to-day work from becoming boring or repetitive, as the depth and variety of Spencer Library’s collections means that I always have something new-to-me to work on.

Angela Andres, special collections conservator

This is the latest installment in a recurring series of posts introducing readers to the staff of Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Today’s profile features Ruby Rhodd, who joined Spencer Research Library in October 2022 as a Special Collections Serials Cataloger.

Where are you from?

I’ve lived in Kansas since I was 3 years old. I was raised in White Cloud, located in northeast Kansas near my tribal reservation, the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. I currently reside in Leavenworth, Kansas and commute to Lawrence daily for work.

How did you come to work at Spencer Research Library?

During the covid-19 shutdown, I realized I wasn’t happy where I was at and decided to pursue jobs in the library field. During my undergrad at KU, I had a small library job at the Murphy Art & Architecture Library on the KU campus, and thoroughly enjoyed it as it was one of the main reasons why I pursued employment with KU Libraries. I was hired in October of 2022 with the choice of three different positions. I chose Spencer because I wanted to work somewhere with the most challenges, but also their “rare materials” sounded like they would be cool to work with.

What does your job at Spencer entail?

I am the Special Collections Serials Cataloger. I catalog anything that is a periodical, journal, newspaper, zine, etc., and anything that has the intention of being published forever and ever. I create new records for these materials, or I enhance and update the records we already have. These records are what our users see when searching our catalog. I also house most of the items before they are put in the stacks. As part of my duties, I supervise students and teach them to label our collections, and I create projects for them that help with collection maintenance.

What part of your job do you like best?

I love the tediousness that it entails; busy work and paying attention to tiny details is satisfying. I have also enjoyed my path to realizing that I want to expand my knowledge and background to further my career in the library world and use this experience to one day become an archivist for my tribe and enhance their efforts of preserving our tribal history. I owe credit to Spencer, as an institution, and to everyone I work with who have inspired me to pursue my master’s degree in library science. Coming to work everyday at a place that values the preservation of materials to educate future generations is rewarding.

What is one of the most interesting items you’ve come across in Spencer’s collections?

Overall, there’s a lot of interesting items. I really enjoy the format of Index (Ser C294). It’s all loose-leaf and artistically put together. The Wilcox collection has a lot of very interesting and extreme materials that make me question why humans are so odd. The Spencer Library’s fanzine collection is weird, but in a good way. Also, I have come across a local Kansas newspaper that had a member of my family on the front page. It was fun learning more about them.

What are some of your favorite pastimes outside of work?

Well, my time outside of work used to consist of creating native inspired beadwork/regalia for myself, but now it mostly consists of schoolwork. I just started my master’s degree with Emporia State University in Library and Information Management. Any time left after that, I spend with my family, friends, and my dog Bella.

Ruby Rhodd
Special Collections Serials Cataloger

The Rare Materials Cataloging Unit at Spencer Research Library describes primary source material across all of the Library’s collecting areas and makes them accessible via the KU Libraries online catalog. We work on a variety of materials from incunabula (books printed in Europe before 1501) to recently produced zines, and a whole lot in between! 

The Rare Materials Cataloging Unit documents work in a variety of ways. One way is through the measurement of linear feet, which is one foot or twelve inches. This measurement is used because books – and boxes of archival material – vary in size. Calculating linear feet often means measuring the width of the materials (in inches) as they take up physical space on shelves and then dividing by twelve. We use the “Guidelines for Standardized Holdings Counts and Measures for Archival Repositories and Special Collections Libraries” (PDF) – a professional standard from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association and the Society of American Archivists – as guidance for managing these counts.

Below are the linear feet equivalents of materials we have completed working on for each Spencer Research Library collecting area from roughly January 1, 2024 through June 30, 2024.

We’ve handled 2428 items during that time, amounting to a little over 176 linear feet (2112.65/12). You can picture this as a line of books stretching almost sixty yards down a football field. See the breakdown below:

Collecting Area	Number of Items	Size (inches)
University Archives	62	98.6
Kansas Collection	614	446.3
Special Collections	1198	1355.85
Wilcox Collection	554	211.9
TOTALS	2428	2112.65

Of the backlogged materials (anything arriving prior to June 2022) cataloged in the first six months of 2024, the two longest-waiting items were El Hallazgo, purchased from Otero Muñoz in 1972 (Call Number: Griffith Q116), and Blätter der Rilke-Gesellschaft, no.1, 1972, purchased from the Schweizerisches Rilke-Archiv in 1973 (Call Number: Rilke Y1113).

The heaviest item we’ve cataloged since June 2022 is the fine press photo book Antarctica, which was created by Pat and Rosemarie Keough to save the albatross (Call Number: H480).

Highlights for each collecting area include the following:

• For Special Collections: Carta executoria de hidalguía de Lazaro de Adarve, 1570 (Call Number: MS E289), an early modern manuscript that arrived with a detached lead seal.
• For University Archives: The Jayhawk: The Story of the University of Kansas’s Beloved Mascot, the 2023 book publication by our much-loved prior University Archivist, Becky Schulte (Call Number: GV691.U542 S35 2023).
• For the Kansas Collection: American Winds: Chicago’s Pioneering Black Aviators and the Race for Equality in the Sky (2024) by Sherri L. Smith, Spencer Research Library’s 2020 Alyce Hunley Wayne travel awardee (Call Number: RH C12791), and Head Jobs, Vol 1-5 (2022-2024), a serial zine publication by a local Lawrence, Kansas, zine-maker (Call Number: RH Ser C1591).
• For the Wilcox collection: Wonders of Nature (2023), an experimental sound recording (Call Number: WL AV10).

Jaime Groetsema Saifi
Special Collections Cataloging Coordinator

This is the latest installment in a recurring series of posts introducing readers to the staff of Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Today’s profile features Adrienne Sanders, who joined Spencer Research Library in September 2023 as a Rare Materials Cataloging Librarian.

Where are you from?

I’ve lived in Lawrence for over 25 years, so I think I’m from here now. I grew up in various places around the greater Kansas City area and went to college in Southern California, then came to Lawrence after getting my undergraduate degree in linguistics. I like it here so I stayed.

How did you come to work at Spencer Research Library?

I didn’t set out to specifically work with rare materials. I worked in Watson Library at KU as a cataloging staff member for many years, and then at Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library for several years. Both positions had me working with rare materials some of the time. I worked with Latin American materials from Spencer’s Griffith collection at KU and with local history materials in Topeka. This position combines my cataloging and rare materials experience, although I’m still learning more all the time.

What does your job at Spencer entail?

Cataloging, in a nutshell, is creating the description of library materials that goes into an online catalog or database, so users can find out what we have. I describe the item physically, and I also assign subject headings that say what the work is about and call numbers that tell where the item is located in the stacks. There are multiple sets of rules that tell me how to compose and structure a bibliographic record, as well as conservation guidelines we follow to physically protect the materials. All of this is so when people search our catalog, they get results that (hopefully) show them what they want and how to access it through the library.

What part of your job do you like best?

I love learning a little bit about lots of things, and this job is perfect for that. Most materials come to me in batches of similar things that were donated or purchased together and are similar in topic or genre. I have to quickly learn what they’re about in order to describe them. It could be anything from 100 books about flying saucers to a dozen zines about political protests in Hong Kong. It keeps me from ever getting bored!

What is one of the most interesting items you’ve come across in Spencer’s collections?

One of the most interesting items I’ve worked with is also one of the oldest items. It’s a document created in Spain in 1570, called a carta executiva de hidalguía (or ejecutiva in modern spelling). These cartas were created to commemorate successfully petitioning the king to become nobility. (One of the benefits of being nobility was not having to pay taxes.) It’s written in gothic script and has a couple of pages of fantastic painted illustration. It turned out to be harder to read than I’d predicted, as I quickly learned that particular type of gothic script didn’t use punctuation marks or spaces between the words. The majority of materials I work with are from the 20th century, so this was both a challenge and a treat to catalog.

What are some of your favorite pastimes outside of work?

I’ve been knitting for many years, and it’s my favorite, but I will dabble in just about any craft involving yarn, fiber, or fabric. I’ve done a little crochet, embroidery, cross stitch, spinning (making yarn on a spindle), yarn dyeing, quilting, sewing, macrame, and probably more I’m forgetting. In stereotypical librarian fashion, I read a lot/listen to audiobooks, mostly literary fiction and science fiction. I also enjoy going to museums and historical sites, especially when traveling to places that are new to me.

Adrienne Sanders
Rare Materials Cataloging Librarian

Projects in Spencer are rarely the work of a single individual; instead, they often involve drawing in individuals across all corners and departments of the library. And when you’re very lucky, you can even call in the cavalry and recruit outside help. This has been the case in one of our ongoing projects centering around digitizing – or creating online digital reproductions – of a subset of our Japanese materials.

Spencer is home to an exceptional collection of materials dedicated to Natural History and particularly to ornithology and the study of birds. Thanks to several substantial acquisitions in the 1960s, we now have an exciting and unique range of Japanese works of falconry and artwork of birds spanning from the early 16^th through the early 20^th centuries that stand as a bright jewel within our ornithological crown. Our ongoing digitization project aims to help bring these materials to a wider audience and to connect our collection to researchers across the globe.

Woodblock prints No. 5 and 6 from Keinen kachō gafu by Imao Keinen, 1891-1892.
Call Number: Ellis Aves G21

To achieve this goal, we have been hard at work both within the KU libraries: the project was conceived by KU Japanese Studies Librarian Michiko Ito, and throughout the project, she has dedicated substantial time towards helping us enhance the depth and detail of many of our catalog records for these items – in doing so, she ensures that researchers who search our catalogs will be able to find the materials more easily, and will know more about the items in terms of their content, their artists and authors, when and where the book was made, and more. Michiko’s language and subject expertise have been bolstered by the cataloging skills of our Head of Cataloging and Archival Processing, Miloche Kottman, who has helped Michiko with the unique challenges that rare books and materials can present in cataloging them.

Part of this process has also involved tracking down the provenance of these materials – the history of how they came to have a home on Spencer’s bookshelves. M own work as one of Spencer’s Special Collections curators has come into play in tracking down old purchase records in our files, to help us trace the physical migration of books across space and time, so that we can add this information to our catalog records and metadata.

And Michiko reached out across oceans, contacting the National Institute of Japanese Literature about the possibility of linking our digitized materials with their international database of digitized Japanese literature so that when scholars search the database, they can find and view Japanese rare books from libraries across the globe. As part of this collaboration, one of their affiliated scholars, Dr. Kazuaki Yamamoto, flew here from Japan to further decipher the many exciting details of our collections. He helped identify ownership marks to trace the history of these items over the centuries, dated materials, and identified arcane and obsolete vocabulary and handwriting.

Woodblock prints from vol. 1 of Bunrei Gafu by Maekawa Bunrei, 1885. Call Number: Ellis Aves E241

Meanwhile, our Conservation team’s representative, Angela Andres, has been involved in reviewing the items to ensure that they are in safe and stable conditions and ready for digitization. Japanese paper, called washi, is renowned for its soft texture, but its softness can leave it fragile, and their book covers are sometimes coated in powdered mica to give a metallic sparkle, but it leaves the covers vulnerable to friction and wearing away over the centuries. Her work has involved crafting new protective enclosures for some of the more delicate materials, which will help support the softer paper when it’s shelved upright and minimize any friction and rubbing that might wear away the mica coating. Doing so helps us protect and preserve the originals so that they survive together with their online copies.

Selected page from Shasei. Kincho bu, by Yoshiki Gyokei, 1853, with a custom box and interleaved acid-free paper to protect the delicate pages. Call Number: MS G49

The next step, hopefully coming soon, is to send the items down to our digitization team helmed by Melissa Mayhew, where they will be scanned into high-resolution TIFF files and with the help of our Digital initiatives librarian Erin Wolfe, they’ll be uploaded onto the online platforms of both the University of Kansas and the National Institute of Japanese Literature’s database with relevant metadata to help researchers connect our collections with books and manuscripts from other libraries around the world.

In many ways, this project embodies all the work and challenges that can go into Special Collections libraries and the efforts we make toward making delicate and rare materials accessible to as many people as possible. From cataloging to preserving, to digitizing and uploading them to the greater internet, no librarian works alone!

Eve Wolynes
Special Collections Curator