houghtonlib:Frass: debris or excrement produced by insects. This manuscript is part of the José Agus
houghtonlib:Frass: debris or excrement produced by insects. This manuscript is part of the José AgustoEscoto collection of Cuban history and literature. The1574 manuscript in a later binding had extensive beetle damage from its previous life in the Caribbean when it arrived at Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. There weresuch copious frass deposits that large sections of the 119 pages were stucktogether, so much so that the text could not be read. Karen Walter, seniorpaper conservation technician, had a lot of work ahead of her.The manuscript needed to be stabilized fordigitization by disbinding, separating the fragile pages, re-attaching thefragments with media, and rehousing in Mylar sleeves.It was the “separating” part of this task thatworried Karen until, during disbinding, she realized that the frass was verybrittle. She did a test using a Teflon tool to apply pressure through the paperon top of a small area of frass and was surprised when it crumbled awayallowing her to slide a microspatula further between the two pages until it hitthe next deposit. In the worst cases, this step was repeated dozens of times.As a result, the pages were successfullyseparated with minimal loss of media revealing text which had been inaccessiblefor many years. And as a bonus, it turned out that crushing desiccated bug poopfor days was a lot of fun! -- source link
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