General Collections conservation is a necessary and key activity of an effective preservation program. This manual has been written to provide background on standard commercial book production, give guidelines for selecting appropriate candidates for in-house book repair, and introduce staff to the elements of book repair. Included is a bibliography of sources used in preparing this manual, a link to the Roberts & Etherington "Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology",a list of necessary book repair tools, and instructions for ten simple repairs.

In-house book repair is appropriate for general collections materials not needing complete rebinding by a commercial binder. The advantages of repairing materials in-house are that high use materials can be returned to the stacks more quickly and simple repairs may often be done more economically. These advantages must be weighed against the cost in staff time and training associated with book repair staff attaining an acceptable level of expertise. Additionally, simple book repair treatment, while a single activity, is based upon a series of preservation decisions. A number of pre-repair questions should be asked before a book reaches the repair stage. Bibliographers should play a role in most repair decisions. For that reason, the emphasis of this manual will be on simple book repair; that is, those repairs that are most easily completed in-house on non-brittle books, by staff with a good understanding of book repair, and often do not require that a bibliographer make a repair, replacement, or reformat decision on the item.

Circulating collections are victims of a number of stresses. Among them are the quality and nature of the materials used in producing the book, the library environment, and their relatively high use and treatment by patrons. Each factor presents its own set of stresses on a book. Each factor is important in assessing risk to the collection and anticipating the quantity of repairs that will be handled on a yearly average. It is expected that approximately 2,000 to 4,000 books will need repair from the Dartmouth College Libraries General Collections each year. A percentage of these will fall under the definition of a 'simple repair'. Because the book repair program in Preservation Services is in its infancy it will take several years of data gathering before we will be able to accurately predict the number of repairs we can accommodate in-house each year.

Finally, in-house book repair should not be seen as a solution to book damage. We know that a certain percentage of our collection will wear out each year. An element of an effective book repair operation should be an examination of the causes that generate repairs. While some causes, such as the absence of environmental controls, may be impossible to change, increasing staff and users' awareness of how books should be handled will aid in decreasing the number of books needing repairs. A responsible conservation operation should be run in tandem with a program to increase public and staff awareness of the need for responsible general collections book handling.

Top of page