I am pleased to announce plans for a book cleaning project to take place in the library througout the summer vacation 2011.Local 'heritage volunteers' from NADFAS (National Association of Decorative & Fine Arts Societies) will be cleaning our rare books. They will be using a range of specialist brushes and a vacuum cleaner to delicately remove the hundred years' worth of dust that covers the ca. 6,000 items in the library's Special Collections! The dust is one major cause of the deterioration of the bindings and the pages of the books.
This does mean that there will be some disruption during the times that the volunteers are cleaning. The volunteers will be here most Thursday mornings from 10.00 a.m. until 1.30 p.m. Their first session is on Thursday 14th July, and they will be here hopefully right up until October. There will be some noise in the 'Newton Room' (i.e. the room where the photocopiers are), which is where the volunteers will be based; they will be using the desks there and will have all their equipment there. Please ask library staff for assistance if you need access to anything in this area when the volunteers are present. Using the photocopiers will still be fine however. Please note that we have temporarily moved the scanner into the domed study area of the library.
There will be 4 volunteers in total, I'm sure you will make them feel welcome if you see them out and about in the department and in the Tea Room. We will introduce them to members of the department whenever we can. We are extremely pleased that they will be able to help make the items in our special collections much more pleasant to handle, and to conserve and preserve them for future generations of scholars.
You can find out more about NADFAS here: http://www.nadfas.org.uk/
Watch this space for further information: we hope to post some 'before and after' photos and include some other general photos in informative blog posts during the project!
