All pictures for this post are by Natalya Pashkova.
This past Friday I had won the SJSU SLIS ALASC lottery to be one of the few privileged to participate in a behind the scenes tour of the Huntington Library in Pasadena. The tour was free as was the parking and it took place before the buildings and grounds opened for the day. It was a whirlwind tour that lasted 2 1/2 nonstop hours through many of the never seen rooms where the conservators, librarians and archivists work at the library. I wound up taking 10 pages of notes, meeting old and new friends on the tour, and being wowed more than once.
First we were given a short summary of the library, art collection and botanical gardens. We were shown a small segment of the Huntington, since it also comprises art and gardens. We then went on to see where the student fellows work (their own offices on a floor of the Munger building), and where the conservators work their magic. We were shown book repair of folios, such as this before and after pic:
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| 2 books: one with new binding and boards, one without. |
We saw custom built solvent tables and baths to remove stains from paper and maps where it takes one hour per inch to remove unwanted tape:
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| This map has had 25 hours of work on it to remove tape! |
Many of the book tools used for repair were acquired in the 1920's when Henry Huntington set up the place and the tools themselves they believe were made in the 18th and 19th centuries! See these and sort of what's hanging on the wall:
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| Some 18th and 19th century book tools. |
Onward to the Imaging Lab and the center of the library's photo department. Since the Huntington are their own publishers, they create their own images. Here's a few statistics: 252,000 images made, 28 terabytes saved, highest possible resolution always. If the image costs $1 to make, the metadata costs them $15 to make, all images are tiff format. CONTENTdm, OCLC, MetaArchive, and LOCKSS all used to save and secure data. Labor is their highest cost. The library is not in a position to do any hiring (that's the worst statistic of all!) Some samples of their photo work:
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| No that's not a pirate! |
The Munger is their new building which is 90,000 sq ft. They all used to work in the old building in cramped quarters. Now onward to the library section and the librarians. There are 9 librarians who are all involved in one way or another in cataloging. Last year the library acquired 2,600 books which for the most part will need unique metadata. They do the best metadata possible and then move on. The library is always getting in new books. There is lots of collaboration between libraries. For instance, the Huntington acquired a copy of Newton's Principia but the librarians could not identify the language it was in. It was narrowed down to Mongolian, but how on earth to read the book in order to create the catalog entry? Some librarian was located in Washington State as an expert and after an email and some faxing of pages, the entry was complete in 30 minutes! With the library's new digital presence, all librarians are encouraged to spend one day a week "digital Fridays" working on their digital library. One of the library's recent acquisitions was the Burndy Collection of science works. Remember at one time there were no title pages in books. Incunabula do not have them so processing here at the Huntington can be a challenge. Here's a pic of one book who's cataloging is in process:
The tour ended and after a much needed rest and lunch, we headed on to the new permanent exhibition of science books from the Burndy collection donated in 2006 to the library. And here's what I found:
There was so much more learned from this tour, but I don't want to make this post too long. I just want to say that I was so wowed that for the first time while visiting the Huntington, I didn't visit the Gutenberg Bible nor Audubon's Folio. What a day!
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