University Daily Kansan, August 21, 1985
Page 6
Exhibits range from exotic to aesthetic Campus museums open world to their visitors
Exhibits range from exotic to aesthetic
By Gina Kellogg
Staff Reporter
Staff Reporter
Museums at the University of Kansas are more than just places to go when mom and dad visit on Parents Weekend. The museums also can be interesting places to spend a few hours out of the summer's heat or the winter's chill.
A diversity of interests can be satisfied by KU's museums. Students walking their quiet halls can see exhibits of church brochures, bugs, prehistoric mammals, printing presses and even a stuffed horse, Comanche, one of the few survivors of the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Besides the better-known museums on campus — the Spencer Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History and the Museum of
Anthropology — other museums can be found.
For example, the Ryther Museum of Printing, in the Printing Service building on 15th Street, contains the only working Simplex typesetting machine in the country.
Thomas C. Ryther, former director for whom the museum was named, said recently that most of the typesetting machines across the country were destroyed when the Linotype machine was invented. Thus, finding a Simplex machine in an order was not an easy task, he said.
Also at the Ryther museum are a slug-casting machine, presses and miscellaneous small equipment used from the Civil War through World War II. Photographs of some of the
machines in use hang on the walls and examples of type also are on display.
Another lesser-known museum is the Museum of Invertebrate Paleontology in Lindley Hall. The museum, which is mainly used for research, has some wall case displays on the first and third floors. Al Kamb, the museum's director, described the displays as fossils of animals without backbones and other items of general geological interest.
The University of Kansas Herbarium, although not open to the public, offers researchers the largest collection of dried plants in the Midwest. Ralph Brooks, the director, and his team examined an album filled in the murky sediment.
were used in the museum's catches.
For the bug enthusiast, KU offers a
research collection of more than 2.5 million insects in the Snow Entomological Museum in Snow Hall. Educational exhibits can be viewed by the novice entomologist in the third-floor hallway of the building.
However, money finally was raised to put the museum in its new site, he
Lippincott Hall will be the site in May for the Wilcox Classical Museum, which originally was in old Fraser Hall. Rain ruined much of the museum, but Stanley Lomardo, chairman of斯坦莱大学classics.
The museum will include a collection of larger-than-life casts of famous Greek sculptures, along with casts of the metopes from the Parthenon — slablike pieces covered
with relief sculptures — that will line the walls of the museum.
Other casts of busts and smaller statues will be displayed with some original pottery, coins and other artifacts.
Another new exhibit at the University opened in 1884 at the Museum of Anthropology in Spooner Hall. The exhibit takes the visitor on a walking tour through the life cycle of a human, from birth to death. Ethnographic materials from around the world and prehistoric archeological collections are also on display.
One of the largest collections on campus is the Museum of Natural History. Visitors can take a 2,000-mile trip from the Arctic to the tropics in a mere 10-minute stroll
through the Panorama of North American Plants and Animals, which is on the main floor of Dyche Hall.
Even more is on display on the fifth floor. There stands Comanche, the U.S. cavalry horse who was one of the few survivors of the Battle of Gettysburg, the Sloux and Northern Cheyenne Indians defeated the U.S. forces.
For the art connoisseur, the Spencer Museum of Art contains 25,000 art objects in all media — painting, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, drawings and photographs.
Exhibits from other museums around the country also are on display at Spencer. "Threads of Gold: Brocades and Embroideries of the Church" will be on display until Sept. 1.
Libraries seek ways of saving crumbling pages in books
By Angela Posada Staff Reporter
Staff Reporter
Thousands of decomposing books printed 75 and even 25 years ago sit in library stacks around the world, books falling apart at the slightest touch.
Libraries at the University of Kansas are no exception to this threat.
"It's a really serious problem," Bill Mitchell, conservator and associate special collections librarian, said recently.
"We did a survey on the Watson Library stacks about 10 years ago, and we ran into books from the '50s that were beginning to show their age and, by and large, books that were 75 years old were disintegrating," Mitchell said.
"Watson's stacks are full of these," he said as he opened a decaying book printed 70 years ago. Its bleached pages crumbled.
He said libraries usually spent more money on acquisitions than for conservation of the books they already had.
"A clear principle to follow in general is not to acquire what you can't take care of," Mitchell said. "Buying a book with the knowledge that it won't be usable in 50 or 75 years is worse than ironic. We should put our funds to the maintenance of whatever we have."
KU libraries are financed by state funds and grants, said Jim Ranz, dean of libraries. But the University is striving to raise as much money as it can to preserve books and acquire new ones.
"We've been asking for funds for conservation in the past, but they simply haven't come." Ranz said.
Nancy Shawbaker, assistant to the dean, said the KU libraries' annual budget was $7.6 million.
"We don't really have the exact cost figures for conservation yet, but we are working on a questionnaire for the Association of Research that includes some questions on conservation costs," Shawbaker said.
Mitchell said at least 10 percent of acquisitions should include property sales.
"Different people think we have to do different things," Ranz said. "If we were to do everything people say, we would need an incredibly large sum of money to take care of conservation."
Before 1850, paper was made by hand from cotton and linen rags, which were strong and produced high-quality paper.
As demand increased, paper was handmade from wood pulp, which is manufactured in the United States.
But groundwood — most commonly used today in newsprint — is also inexpensively made. All wood paper contains cellulose fibers that cause it to hold together once the pulp is molded. Groundwood fibers are not damaged from axial wood material and thus are exposed to its eroding action.
So paper processed after 1870 is contaminated by acids that are decomposing it.
"The bright side is that now we
know what is going on with the paper," Mitchell said. "We have developed ways to de-acidify the pulp by exposing it to chemical solutions that will help preserve it.
"However, today we have all kinds of paper quality, and if you talk to a printer, he will only mention its opacity and printability, but he won't think about its future.
"Many of the books produced today look all right. But the thing is that 50 years from now, or less, they will be brittle and bleached."
Sue Craig, librarian at the Murphy Library of Art History, said, "This becomes unfortunate because it means that everybody in the country is having problems with exactly the same books."
Librarians say the best they can do is retard the decay as much as possible by maintaining books and manuscripts in an optimal environment that will help preserve them from heat, moisture, insects, mold, dust, light and noxious gases from polluted air.
Librarians agree, however, that any special treatment given to books may be beneficial.
Richard Ring, Watson collection development librarian, said the biggest problem in Watson was vandalism.
"People tear entire pages and sections, underline paragraphs, write philosophical statements." Ring said. "They say they are going to liberate the books they don't agree with."
Except for damages caused by
people, most paper enemies can be reasonably controlled as long as the financial and technical resources are available.
The best solution, one that all librarians wish they had, is a process developed in 1982 by the Library of books that extends the life of books.
According to Mitchell, this process, called DEZ — diehydrin-zinc — promises to expand the useful shelf life of a book up to 400 years.
The process, Mitchell said, neutralizes the acid in paper when the books are sprayed with a gas called diethyl-zin, which not only gets rid of the destructive acid but leaves an alkaline residue to provide future resistance.
Because DEZ bursts into flames when it touches air, the whole process must be done in a vacuum.
DEZ is an expensive treatment and can cost up to $10 a book.
"But on the other hand," Mitchell said, "you don't think anything at all about spending $20 to $100 in books that are going to disintegrate in some years."
Mitchell said he thought KU one day could share DEZ equipment with other libraries in the state and cooperate with the libraries in conservation enterprises.
"We have become more aware of conservation during the last five years," he said.
Mitchell said the 180,000 rare books and 2 million documents and single sheets at Spencer Research Library were in relatively good shape.
"Most of our documents are 18th century or earlier," he said, "an age when writing materials were better."
Spencer's oldest printed document is a leaf from a Bible from about 1415 to 1445. It is well-preserved because it was printed on acid-free paper and was kept in an almost ideal environment.
"If you have the wrong environmental conditions, you are really in trouble," Mitchell said. "The biggest privilege of Spencer library is that it was specially built to contain rare books, and it has total control of temperature, humidity and light."
The library maintains a year round temperature of 70 degrees with humidity of 50 percent, even though the ideal temperature for paper is 60 degrees or below.
"The cooler the better," Mitchell said, "because the chemical reaction that you are fighting accelerates when temperature increases. It doubles every 10 degrees in a scary geometrical relation. Zero degrees Celsius is actually ideal because then there is no chemical activity of that sort.
"However, we, like most librarians, simply compromise, and maintain the building at temperatures that are comfortable to people. We have to walk this fine line between preserving the book and making it available to you."
making it available to you.
Mitchell said the temperature at Spencer was constant everywhere in the building because the books suffered with climatic changes.
"It is as if you take a glass of ice tea out in a summer day," he said. "As water condenses, it begins to sweat."
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