National Diet Library Newsletter
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at the National Diet Library"
Naoko KOBAYASHI
Assistant
Director
Preservation
Division
Acquisitions
Department
This
is the article
presented at the Conference of Directors of Centers of IFLA-PAC
Asia-Oceania Region & Preservation Meeting among China, Japan and
Korea
at the National Library of
China, Beijing, January 16-19, 2007
1. Acid paper problem and the beginning of the efforts to resolve the problem
The deterioration of mass
produced paper made in factories was recognized as a serious problem
from the end of the 19th century in Western countries, but the one of
the biggest triggers which raised people's awareness on this issue was
the result of a survey conducted in 1957 by William James Barrow, an
American conservator. Barrow examined the extent of deterioration of
paper in publications issued during the first half of the 20th century
by decades, and pointed out that the main factor which had been causing
paper deterioration was the acid in the paper. After this survey, a
movement to encourage the use of acid-free permanent paper was
successfully promoted in the U.S., and in 1984 the ANSI Paper
Permanence Standard (ANSI Z39.48-1984) was established. In Japan,
interest in the acid paper issue was stimulated by the booklet "Hon wo
nokosu" (Preserving books), which was privately published in 1982 by
Mr. Hirotaka KANAYA to introduce the movement with regard to acid paper
issues in the U.S. The booklet had great impact on those involved in
book-related industries such as publishing, book-binding, and
paper-manufacturing as well as those related to mass media and, of
course, libraries.
In 1983 the National Diet
Library (NDL) set up an Anti-Acid Paper Unit to examine measures
against paper deterioration and investigate the state of deterioration
of the NDL collections. The survey was done on 5,449 items picked out
by random sampling from the library's collection that had been issued
during a period of about 100 years up to 1970 including domestic and
foreign books, magazines and legal/parliamentary documents. We checked
the samples of each decade to examine their flexibility and change in
the color of the paper.
We found out that deterioration
of the foreign materials published after the 1860s had generally become
worse as the publication went back. The domestic materials, for whose
preservation our library should be responsible, showed the worst extent
of deterioration in the 1940s to 1950s. The paper made during this
period was not only brittle but also suffered extreme changes in color.
We attributed this to the conditions of the period when the quality of
paper was extremely bad due to the aftermath of the war. Except for
this period, deterioration of the paper was obvious in the publications
issued from the 1880s to the 1910s, i.e., Meiji era. Other than that
period, we found that the newer the paper the better its quality. From
this survey we comprehended the general trend of deterioration of our
collection. It was, however, still before we had our card catalogs
fully converted into online catalog, so it was difficult for us to
estimate the actual number of deteriorated collections including those
that could not be used or restored.
To deal with mass deterioration
of library collections caused by acid, we need to take a new approach
because it is utterly ineffective to restore deteriorated items one by
one by the traditional method. IFLA established the IFLA Working Group
on Preservation in 1973, and upgraded it to the IFLA Section on
Conservation in 1977. The Section set out new preservation principles
in its 1986 report titled, "Principles for the Preservation and
Conservation of Library Materials." The new principles defined
preservation as including not only preserving the original artifacts
but also preserving the content by reformatting. The principles also
introduced a new idea that it is important to give priority to some
materials in preservation while it is impossible to treat every
material of the library collection in an equal manner. (In the same
year the IFLA Core Activity
on Preservation and Conservation (IFLA/PAC)
was established.)
In 1986 preservation and
conservation work at the NDL also reached a major turning point. In
1986, the Annex of the Tokyo Main Library was completed, which
increased the NDL's storage capacity from 450 to 1,200 million volumes.
In tandem with the opening of the Annex Building, the whole library
went through a structural reform. Taking this opportunity, the NDL
renewed its basic policy for preservation and conservation with
organizational backup, and the Binding Division, whose main duty had
been restoring/mending damaged materials, was transformed into the
Preservation Division, and the work of the Division was expanded to
reflect the new principles of preservation and conservation. In
addition, the Preservation Planning Office was established in the
Acquisitions Department as an office specializing in the planning of
preservation policy. The Preservation Division and the Preservation
Planning Office began to work actively together. (In March 2002, the
Preservation Planning Office was abolished in the library's
reorganization and its responsibility was taken over by the
Preservation Division.)
The three major objectives of
the NDL's activities to deal with mass deterioration and the measures
that we have taken so far for each objective are as follows:
1)
Objective: We want to
preserve the content of materials too badly
deteriorated to restore.
Measure: We have
determined to do reformatting as a new measure
of preservation, and thus have been microfilming deteriorated materials
since 1987 according to an across-the-library plan.
2) Objective: We want to treat a
large quantity of acid paper
materials.
Measure: We
consider mass deacidification as a basic method and
have started to investigate the current trends of mass deacidification
methods.
3)
Objective: We want to
promote acid-free paper materials.
Measure: We started since 1986 the pH survey on newly-acquired
materials
aiming to figure out actual conditions of domestic publications.
2. Microfilming of deteriorated collectionsWe found from the 1983 survey
on deterioration of the sample collection that the domestic materials
published during the 1940s to 1950s were in the worst condition, of
which 30,000 extra volumes published during the period around the end
of the World War II were most badly damaged and hardly seemed able to
bear ordinary use. Domestic materials are regarded as one of the
collections on which the NDL should put the highest priority in
preservation of not only the content but also the original materials.
Therefore with this collection as the first target, the NDL started the
microfilming programme of deteriorated collections in 1987. Before this
microfilming programme began, the NDL had already been microfilming
current newspapers since the 1950s and rare and old books, academic
journals, and heavily-used magazines since the 1970s. The main purpose
of microfilming these collections, however, was to preserve valuable
materials and assure future access to them at the same time, rather
than taking a countermeasure against deterioration.
Microfilming the
above-mentioned collection of 30,000 extra volumes was not completed at
one go, but was done bit by bit according to the budget and manpower
available, and finally finished in 2000. The original materials which
had been already microfilmed were put in preservation boxes and then
stored in the stacks for preservation, and thus no longer served for
readers' use. Master negative films are stored in the special storage
space whose temperature and humidity are constantly kept much lower
than the other ordinary book stacks, namely, at 18 degrees centigrade
and 25%. Positive microfiches are made and served for readers' use.
Making deteriorated materials into microfiches has enabled interlibrary
loan and copying services, which had been prohibited with the original
materials.
The collection found
second-worst damaged in the survey was the books published in the Meiji
era (1868-1912). Thus our second microfilming programme started in 1989
with the collection of about 160,000 volumes issued in this period.
This programme was in collaboration with an external contractor, so the
microfilming work was finished at one go within two years. After this
programme, we have been working our way with microfilming domestic
books in chronological order of publication, and we are now expecting
that microfilming the collection published before World War II will be
completed by FY2009. As for the domestic magazines, we have been
microfilming deteriorated magazines published before around the first
half of the 1960s. However, because the budget for reformatting is
limited, some of the deteriorated collections were already damaged
badly before being microfilmed. We know well that having these damaged
materials copied does even more harm to them, but the reality is that
we have to provide copies of the original materials if requested by
library users and we have fallen into a vicious circle in that we are
creating a pile of damaged materials which no longer bear normal use by
readers.
With regard to colorful
materials, large-sized materials, and non-book materials, we should
consider other means such as preservation by digitization. We should
look into the most suitable ways of reformatting according to the
characteristics of each collection.
3. Survey and implementation of mass deacidificationOther than reformatting,
deacidification is the only way to save a mass of materials damaged by
acid. The Preservation Planning Office, established in 1986, embarked
on research into state-of-the-art of mass deacidification methods
already used in some other countries of advanced preservation
technologies and a survey on the situation of R&D in Japan to
promote the results to a wider community.
To promote and distribute
information on the up-to-date mass deacidification technologies used in
overseas countries, we translated and published in 1989 "Book
Preservation Technologies" (issued by the Office of Technology
Assessment, U.S. Congress, 1988). This report explains the mass
deacidification plan of the Library of Congress based on the method
called "DEZ process." The NDL also introduced information on other
methods of deacidification. In the latter half of the 1980s, researches
on acid paper and deacidification took off in Japan, too. The NDL
provided samples to these researches and participated in some of the
research projects as a partner.
In 1997 the NDL commissioned
specialists in Japan to investigate the effectiveness of
deacidification technologies for old books. The specialists reported to
the NDL that there is an effective and practical solution, which is a
new mass deacidification method by the gaseous phase called "DAE
process" (dry ammonia ethylene oxide). In fall 1998, a private company
put the DAE process into operation and still continues to provide the
service. In 1999 and 2000 the NDL experimentally deacidified about
4,000 spare copies of domestic books published during the period from
the 1950s to 1960s. The result was that after treatment the average pH
value of 4.56 rose to 9.76 and that a tearing resistance test done by
the company showed the paper becoming three to five times stronger. So
what we got from the experiment proves that the method is effective for
mass deacidification.
We also found, however, that an
odor remained in the treated materials which made the staff feel sick,
and to get rid of the odor it was necessary to give air wash more than
100 times. Later we found out that the cause of the odor was
acetaldehyde which had been generated in the process of
deacidification. This problem of odor was reported by other libraries,
too: According to an assessment done by chemical substance specialists,
the amount of acetaldehyde generated in the process does not exceed the
safety standard and does not have an effect on the human body. Despite
this assessment, there are still anxieties among the staff about
dealing with a mass of treated materials. For this reason, we decided
not to adopt this method for mass deacidification at that point.
While we still keep a close
watch on the improvement of the DAE process, which is the only mass
deacidification service in Japan, we checked again the latest
deacidification technologies in overseas countries from 2004 to 2005.
It was only a literature search that we had done 15 years ago, but this
time we could visit libraries to see actual on-the-spot
deacidification, in addition to literature search. What we found this
time is that there are different methods of deacidification which all
succeeded in neutralizing the acid in paper but that each of the
methods has some kind of risk of damaging the materials, such as
discoloration and physical damage. Now we understand that each method
has its pros and cons and that we need to examine all conceivable risks
and merits of each method in the use and preservation of library
materials. In 2007 a mass deacidification service by the method called
BookKeeper is expected to start operation in Japan. Thus we need to
compare different methods and move one step forward to decide which
method would be most suitable for our library collections.
4. Survey on use rate of acid-free paper and growth in publications using acid-free paperIf all publications issued in
Japan and deposited with the NDL were made of acid-free paper,
long-term preservation might be possible without any special care in
terms of paper. Thus the Preservation Planning Office started surveys
on the use rate of acid-free paper in newly-acquired materials in 1986
to figure out the actual conditions of publication and to urge the use
of acid-free paper. They are random sampling surveys of new materials
acquired by the NDL a year before to measure the pH level. Samples are
categorized into four groups: according to publisher type, i.e.,
official or commercial; and publication type, i.e., books or
periodicals.
In the first survey in 1986,
the use rate of acid-free paper for commercial publications was around
50% and that for official publications around 30%. The rate for
official publications remained consistently lower than that for
commercial publications until 2001. We initially used flathead
electrodes and pH indicator strips for in-depth measurement of the pH
level, but when the use rate of acid-free paper for commercial
publications became stable at around 80%, we switched to the simpler
test method of using an acid-free paper checking pen from the 11th
survey. The use rate for official publications, having remained around
50% for a long time, has begun increasing in the past decade, and
both rates for commercial and official publications reached above 90%
in the 2003 survey. For more details on survey method and background,
please refer to "Sixteen
Years of pH Surveys on Newly-acquired
Materials" (International Preservation News, No.28, December 2002).
Reflecting a growing interest
in environmental issues, the recent trend is to encourage more use of
recycled paper. Thus our surveys have also come to include the use rate
of recycled paper for publications and the use rate of acid-free paper
in recycled paper since 1997. The latest survey result showed that the
use rate was about 20% and 90% respectively. It is difficult to grasp
the actual state, however, because there is no standard definition of
recycled paper and some materials have no indication that they are
produced from recycled paper.
cf. Result of the 18th survey on use rate of acid-free paper on newly-acquired materials (NDL Newsletter No.150, August 2006) In addition to publicizing each
survey result in the NDL monthly bulletin, we have been working hard to
stress the importance of preservation across the industries by
creating/distributing pamphlets to promote the use of
acid-free/permanent paper and by inviting guests from the publishing
and paper manufacturing industries to hold symposia and lectures on
preservation. We believe that alerting people to the importance of
measures against the acid paper problem and promoting use of acid-free
paper by these means must have contributed to the high use rate of
acid-free paper in present-day Japan. Now that the use of acid-free
paper for new publications has become almost a common practice, it can
be said that the amount of acid paper materials for which the NDL needs
to take measures will not continue to increase. The acid paper problem
has changed from the one that will never stop causing trouble forever
to the one which we can handle in a planned manner.
5. Emergence of difficult new problemsThe storage capacity of the NDL
has remarkably increased, jumping from 12 to 18 million volumes due to
the opening of the Kansai-kan of the NDL in October 2002. There was not
only expansion of the library facilities, but also provision of
bibliographic information on the Internet launched in 2002, which led
to much greater use of our library collections. The number of requests
for copying services has been increasing dramatically while requests
for the lending services of our collections have not increased as much,
since the NDL collections are not permitted to be lent out to
individuals but only to libraries; the NDL is recognized as the "last
resort" of the nation's information resources. The annual number of
copying requests from remote users of FY2005, counted by article, was
about 300,000, three times as many as that of FY2002.
What worries us with such an increase in the use of our collections is the expanding deterioration of the collections. The number of repaired materials appears in the annual statistics of the NDL. An increase in the number of damaged materials, however, is not apparent in our statistics since the "stocks" of materials that are damaged but not yet treated are put on a waiting list and not counted in the statistics. Such "stocks" are accumulating in stacks, and they must not be left untreated. Although it is difficult to restore all damaged materials, we thought if we could find out the characteristics of deterioration by each collection group, we could effectively implement preventive measures appropriate for each group. Accordingly a survey on deterioration of Japanese books on which we set high priority in preservation was conducted. About 1.9 million Japanese books that had been published within 50 years from the 1950s and had not yet been included in any specific plans for microfilming were targeted. A sample of 400 volumes was picked out at random, divided by each decade, and their paper and binding conditions were examined. In the same kind of survey carried out in 1983 we examined only paper condition. However in this survey we checked the degree of deterioration of the binding as well as paper condition in order to evaluate more easily whether they are strong enough for use. Also in this survey we simplified the evaluation scale because the purpose of the survey was to contribute to practical reviews for preservation measures (for example, as to durability, a 2-point scale was adopted, that is, "Fair" or "Not Fair," rather than the 5-point scale used in the survey of 1983). The survey was conducted in 2005 and 2006, and the results are being compiled now. The major findings of the survey are as follows:
This random sampling survey enables us to roughly estimate the total number of books which have certain characteristics. Through the survey we can figure out, for example, how many materials should be microfilmed (materials that are made of acid paper and have become brittle), and which groups of the collection are suitable for mass deacidification (materials that are made of acid paper but have not become brittle). In this way we can forecast the scale of the countermeasures we need to take. Even though acid-free paper lasts for a long time itself, adhesive binding materials, whose ratio has increased since the 1970s, are easily damaged, for instance, by only one time copying if the adhesive has keratinized with age. As such, new challenges for the future have just come up, and we should consider countermeasures against the damage that is caused not only by acid paper but also by modern binding methods. The acid paper problem had such a big impact in the library world that we had tended to think of the countermeasure against acid paper as the first preservation measure for a great amount of paper materials. However, making books of acid-free and long-lasting paper is not enough to secure them long-time use for reader services. Durable materials must be made of acid-free paper bound in a suitable form for excellent usability for a long period. Now several approaches to deal with the acid paper problem have become available, we have to select the method best suited to the materials targeted. In addition, we need to work on various problems in preserving materials other than problems related to paper, such as binding and copying methods, in order to prevent mass deterioration. Another new issue is the deterioration of microfilms. When a large volume of microfilms were transferred to the Kansai-kan from the Tokyo Main Library in 2002, we found in some microfilms a vinegary smell, which was the first sign of deterioration of cellulose acetate film. As that group of microfilms was not stored and used under particularly worse conditions compared with other groups of microfilms, we expected that other microfilms might possibly suffer deterioration in the same way. Thus we conducted an overarching survey on deterioration of the microfilms in our collections. At the same time we decided to replace the enclosure made of acid paper with acid-free paper so as to improve a storage environment at the micro level. We have been carrying out the survey and replacement of enclosures according to a plan for about 120,000 microfilms and 4.6 million microfiches since 2003 and have already finished some 80,000 microfilms and 800,000 microfiches by FY2005. Duplicates were made of heavily-used cellulose acetate films out of those found to be seriously deteriorated through the survey, and the original films were discarded. As for low-use cellulose acetate films, we did not take any measures other than replacing the enclosures at the beginning. However, we found a case in 2006 where, in spite of the replacement of the enclosures, the replacement enclosures got acidified quickly because of gases released from the deteriorated materials inside, which led to acidification of the enclosures located around them. Separate placement of heavily deteriorated cellulose acetate films should be carried out urgently. The deterioration of cellulose acetate films with age will definitely occur. This has been recognized as one of the most urgent preservation issues and has attracted a lot of attention in Europe and the U.S., but not yet in Japan. We realize that it is our task to raise people's awareness and to create opportunities for information exchange on this issue in Japan. For more information on the conference and other papers presented, go to the IFLA-PAC China Center (last access June 15, 2007) |
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