Assignment #8: Project Summary

The Rare Books Room at the Tarlton Law Library contains a substantial collection of primary materials that document the development of legal practice and tradition on the European, Australian, and both Central and North American continents. These materials are, therefore and without question, relevant to an array of local, state, national, and international communities around the world. Unfortunately, however, many of those materials printed before 1800 in this collection exhibit various states of disrepair – text block splits, cover-to-text attachment cracks, and detached spines, boards, and pages among others. Moreover, a disturbing number of these materials are also evidence to the pitfalls of improper or haphazard repairs such as indiscriminately blanketing a spine and boards in rubber book tape. These materials, in short, demand varying levels of immediate attention to ensure they maintain their relevancy into the foreseeable future.

In order to ensure their relevancy is preserved, we first aim to provide these materials with re-housings where such treatments are deemed appropriate. Systematic re-housing would represent a substantial step towards mitigating the avoidable damage to materials caused by improper shelving and un-shelving from which many of these materials appear to suffer. We also propose to conduct conservation treatments on those materials that stand to benefit the most from such treatments. These conservation treatments would entail, for example, re-treating materials whose previous treatments were shoddy enough to do more harm than good, reattaching boards and spines, and repairing text block splits. Such conservation treatments in tandem with observed and enforced handling policies as well as with re-housing would offer these materials a fighting chance at survival into the future.

Providing re-housings and conservation treatments are each actions whose true benefits may never be as accurately calculated as their time and wage costs. However, there is ample evidence in this collection attesting to the dangers of undertaking too little or even misguided action. We, therefore, estimate these actions to be the most advisable and feasible actions we could perform given our current situation that would allow these materials to remain relevant and accessible to their respective audiences.

Our planned actions – re-housing and conservation treatments – may not have the same sheen or luster as those projects geared towards digitization. Yet it should also be noted that our planned actions represent actions whose efficacies are proven and well-documented. Consequently, our success is far more certain than would, perhaps, be possible otherwise.

One could even argue that our success is far more important as well. This collection is one that already possesses visibility. It has been accessed regularly in the past just as it promises to continue to be accessed into the future by a range of lawyers and legal scholars studying the evolutionary process as it pertains to the development of legal practice in a variety of locales including but not limited to the state of Texas, the United States of America, England, Germany, Spain, and France. Any materials or content lost in such a collection would potentially leave a discernible, unmistakable, and perhaps unforgivable hole in the historical record of legalese.

We – Laura Bedford and John William Nordhaus – are uniquely qualified to conduct and complete this project. As a conservator, Laura is versed in not only performing item-level conservation treatments on materials of different sizes, structures, and chemical compositions, but also in judging and applying the appropriate conservation treatment. As a preservation administrator and a student of history, John possesses the requisite breadth of knowledge in both preservation and historical developments to ensure that this project unfolds in a fashion that is cohesive rather than chaotic, united rather than unruly. Together, we believe that this is a project we can see through to a valuable conclusion that will be valuable to all parties concerned.