huntingtonlibrary: unirdg-collections: rufflesandsteam: unirdg-collections: A Snapshot from the [Bod
huntingtonlibrary: unirdg-collections: rufflesandsteam: unirdg-collections: A Snapshot from the [Bodleian] LibraryA change of tack this week as we present yet another snapshot from our visit to the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. (They showed us so much cool stuff, we can’t help ourselves.)This is the personal travelling library of King Charles I (1600-1649). We can tell that for certain as a couple of his books, mostly classical literature and poetry, contain his own signature (shown above). The Bodleian Rare Books team haven’t even accessioned it yet, and recently acquired it from a private collection. It’s amazingly complete considering its age, although whatever original housing it had is now lost. Those information and pictures are awesome, but for god’s sake I hope the second one isn’t an original because you don’t touch paper that old with your bare hands!The sweat and acids on you hands can seriously destroy the paper and the ink. Please always wear some cotton/acid free gloves! (Mind you that you don’t know where the book has been, what dirt it may contain. If for whatever reason you touched a book that old make sure to wash your hands afterwards!) Sorry for but I worked at an archive and we didn’t even touch field letters from WW2 with our bare hands and they’re not nearly as old. Hi rufflesandsteam, thanks for re-blogging and bringing up this important issue!Policies on handling archives and books vary from institution to institution so we can’t speak on the Bodleian’s behalf, but it’s now common practice in the UK to ask people not to wear gloves. Instead, many institutions ask that people wash their hands prior to handling.One of the reasons for using bare hands is that they allow a better sense of touch than plastic or cotton gloves, meaning there is less chance of tearing or slipping. Cotton gloves have the added annoyance of leaving fibres on documents, catching on things (and never fitting properly!).The exceptions are of course things where fingerprints could leave damage, such as photographs, or particularly dirty documents.If you want to look into the reasons we use bare hands, have a look at the National Archives guidance. It includes exasperated tips such as:Try not to lick your fingers when turning pages We’re team no gloves here at The Huntington, too, except in the cases described above and for the same reasons. The question started coming up a lot here when Hand/Study, a site-specific installation featuring hands working with library collections items, went on view and then more recently when we posted these gifs. -- source link