Thank you Mark. Mark's efforts have made it
easier for NARA to be green.
We are very grateful and proud of the work he is doing.
For those of you who are just joining us,
Mark is our first lecture, but we started about five minutes late.
But according to those lights, we are on schedule.
We have three more speakers this afternoon.
Each will talk for about 15 minutes and then we are allowing some time for questions after.
Welcome if you are just joining us.
I would like to introduce our next speaker,
who is Lisa Isbell.
Lisa is a senior conservator in the Document Conservation Laboratory at NARA.
She had an early background in art with an
AB in studio art and a master's degree in art history.
In the early 80s, she taught art history at
Florida State University where she also supervised the visual resources collection.
She received her introduction to conservation
at the Florida State Archives and later received a MA in conservation of historic and artistic
works from Buffalo State College.
Lisa trained with paper conservators at several institutions.
Prior to coming to NARA, she was a conservator
at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
I will have to ask her more questions about
that; it sounds like fun.
Lisa is going to talk about "Up from the Deep: Treating Records Salvaged from a World War
II Shipwreck".
In December 2007, Ira Kirshenbaum, an archivist in the National Declassification Center, forwarded
an e-mail to me concerning "records from the USS Peary ... that was sunk off of Australia
in 1942.
The records are very badly damaged and deteriorated and placed in burlap bags housed in FRC boxes."
By way of providing an historical context,
the USS Peary, a clemson-class destroyer, was commissioned on October 22, 1920, and
named after the famed polar explorer Robert E. Peary.
Within two years, the Navy assigned the destroyer
to the United States Asiatic Fleet based near Manila in the Philippines.
For the first twenty years, the destroyer's
career was routine.
The December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor found the Peary "cold iron" (meaning that
her boilers were not operating) undergoing what was termed a "Navy Yard overhaul".
Three days later, while she was still immobile,
Japanese bombers attacked the military and naval facilities around Manila, which resulted
in a quarter of the Peary's crew being dead, wounded, or missing.
After dodging Japanese air raids in the Manila
Bay area for more than two weeks, the Peary was ordered to join naval forces in Port Darwin,
Australia.
The Peary made her way down the Philippine archipelago suffering attacks, not only from
the Japanese, but also "friendly fire" from the Australians.
After struggling with an engineering problem,
the destroyer arrived in Port Darwin in northern Australia on January 3, 1942.
The Peary then acted as an anti-submarine
escort for convoys taking supplies and troops to the Netherlands East Indies.
On February 19, 1942, Port Darwin was struck
by a surprise attack by over 200 Japanese aircraft.
All of the ships caught in the harbor were
sunk.
The Peary went down in 90 feet of water.
More than 80 crew and officers died.
Witnesses noted that even as the Peary sank, two machine guns continued to fire at the
assailing aircraft.
The war was fought. Peace attained.
In 1959 -- after seventeen years had passed from the sinking of the Peary -- Australian
authorities contracted with Japanese scrap firm to salvage wrecks on the floor of Darwin
Harbor.
In the course of the salvage effort, the Japanese workers opened the Peary's registered publications
safe and delivered the contents either to the Australian government or to the U.S. embassy.
Either way, the soggy mess ended up in the
hands of the U.S. embassy in Canberra.
A classified material transfer form dated January 4, 1961, indicates that a courier
accompanied the classified records to Washington D.C.
I am indebted to Supervisory Archivist A.J.
Daverede for providing me with the historical context for these records.
I commend to you an article he has written
that is coming out shortly in the National Archives Prologue Magazine.
Forty-six years passed before Ira Kirshenbaum
in the National Declassification Center emailed me with this pessimistically-[worded] message
ending, "Do you think it would be worth a look?"
Three FRC boxes arrived. This is a NARA term
for Federal Record Center boxes.
These boxes in which records are often housed in our record centers and often transferred
to us in this form.
This is the way they looked when they arrived into the lab.
At the time, I noted, "that many of the pages
are blocked and encased in mud."
The conservation and declassification center staff both agreed that the primary purpose
of the conservation treatment was not to make the materials "safe to serve", which is commonly
a goal in the conservation lab
-- but rather merely to get the materials to a point that the archivists could describe
and access the records and make them available in the catalog.
The archivist could then make a preliminary
arrangement and description of the records.
I emphasize this, because there were not dramatic before and after images. It doesn't get much
better.
The conservation treatment largely involved mechanical reduction of the dried mud, dirt,
and rust; and separating materials stuck together.
I was talking to my supervisor yesterday and I said they don't teach you this in the conservation
training program.
Jokingly I told my colleagues that I was involved in archaeological paper conservation.
Since many, but not all, of the encrusted
materials were books, and my conservation [expertise] is more in "flat paper", I frequently
conferred with senior book conservator Gail Harriman.
Early on I commented to Gail that I knew that
after the 1966 Florence flood conservators washed entire books while neither disbinding
them nor separating them into gatherings.
So I asked her if that was an option and she agreed that in light of...
This is to give you...I feel like they were
pieces of shale; they were rock hard.
Gail agreed that in light of the history of the material that is that they had been submerged
all these years and their present condition, it was acceptable to approach them by immersing
them.
I show this; this is an example of before and after.
This is the same book. I also show this by
way of demonstrating that they're not glamorous after treatment images.
This is that same volume as it was in the
course of treatment.
It is immersed in deionized water.
For those not familiar with conservation, underneath is a piece of non-woven polyester
web that you use sort of as a sling to lift it out of the water.
A lot of these materials were not brittle
so much as they were pulpy.
It was like inexpensive paper napkins that had been gotten wet and mushed and had been
encased in mud that was the type of thing I was trying to deal with.
Conservators are primarily concerned with
materials and condition and often at least at the professional level leaving intellectual
conundrums and interpretations to archivists and researchers.
I must admit as these materials were separated
and uncovered, I could not help but be drawn in to the subject matter.
This one I found quite charming. Let's see
if I can do this.
If you look up here you see it says most secret, the most secret. I thought isn't it quaint.
Archivist Daverede advised me that is the British term for what we would say top secret.
The Peary contained American records as well
as British and Dutch records.
Here you see an example of the types of things that were found in the safe.
These are code books. Archivist Daverede advised
me that the military changed codes frequently,
and the cryptographers were under orders that every time they received a new codes, they
were suppose to destroy all the old ones.
What happened is that on the Peary they were very lax about this, so the result is that
the safe ended up being a small library of cryptographic materials immediately preceding
World War II.
Here is another example of the code books.
This image also allows me to state that in beginning this treatment in considering the
background of these materials that they had been submerged and then stored in their burlap
bags in the embassy for a while I was expecting that there would be a lot of mold. In fact
there was very little mold.
If you look at what looks to be like soot the grayish area that is the mold.
There really was not very much at all, which
very much surprised me.
Conservators at the National Archives and really conservators in Washington, DC, we
have the luxury of having access to a number of colleague for consultations for difficult
problems.
I felt very justified in approaching my colleagues to ask questions.
In May 2008, Cathleen Baker visited our lab.
She is a senior conservator of paper and books in preservation & conservation at the University
of Michigan Library in Ann Arbor.
Cathy had been my adviser in graduate school, so I felt comfortable approaching her.
So I asked her if she had any advice.
She came to my bench and saw this and she
said one word ethanol.
I was like okay.
She pointed out that ethanol is an alcohol; it is one of the many solvents that conservators
use.
When paper is immersed in a solvent, it takes on properties different than what it has either
in air or in water.
Subjectively it seems to stiffen and harden.
Cathy thought if we submerged this in ethanol it might be possible to peel them off.
So we thought that was worth a try.
This is a bit of an assembly line production.
This was before I conferred with Cathy.
These volumes are immersed in dionized water. Specifically I want to point out the one in
the top center.
This was one of the problematic ones. These others responded to water treatment, but that
one and the smaller one up there did not.
It was just very pulpy and kept sticking together.
So I thought this is a good candidate for the ethanol treatment.
Here you can see I was working in a fumehood,
and I immersed this in a small tray of ethanol.
I worked with it on and off in the course of a day, and it really behaved very much
as it did in water.
At the end of the day, I just gave up. Okay, I said I have tried my best.
I took it out of the ethanol and left it in
the fumehood to dry out over night.
Thinking that's it; I cannot do anymore. I have done what I can.
The next morning I came in, and it was still
there.
I went over with some of the tools we have in conservation a microspatula, and I started
picking at it and the first page popped off.
I got all excited, and I kept going and going and going.
I got that book apart to my great surprise.
You can see that while the treatment did not
work the way the conservators expected it to it did work, so we were very happy.
This is a method that we use for flattening.
We'll humidify and then place paper between
blotter.
You can see a piece of Plexiglas there.
We put that on top with weights, so we can flatten them.
Then what I did I was relative confident that
I could figure out what pieces went with what sheets, so I was able to retain the sheets
together.
Then I inserted them in these polyester sleeves.
What you see here with my little warning label is that these are not what we would call safe
to serve.
Because we don't like putting more than one piece of paper in a single polyester sleeve,
because there is too much danger of the edges rubbing against each other and causing damage.
I felt this was a method of keeping each sheet
with its companion parts.
Here you see the records as they were returned back to declassification.
You can see they expanded from three boxes
to five, which is very common in a treatment such as this.
In fact if you have a very thorough going
treatment and go further and clean, humidify, flatten, you could probably compress them
back to the same amount of space
There is always this weighting of time versus space, so it is struggling with priorities.
Are there any questions?
Are you relieved that you didn't have to...I
joke that so many of these materials are books that the next person to handle these should
be a book conservator.
My question is about the paper. Was it primarily wove paper? Or was it a mix of laid and wove
paper?
This would have been pre-World War II. I think a lot of it was machine-made wove.
I did not do meticulous documentation. It
was really archaeological excavation.
It was very pulpy.
How many months did you work on this?
Do you remember? It was about a year and a half, but I did not work solidly. It was on
and off as time allowed.
It was always in the background.
I always felt as if there was a haze of harbor silt over my work space.
I don't know if you noticed, but I had it
removed from my regular bench space, cause I just did not want all that too near.
Did you have problems with salt or did the
deionized water take care of that and remove the salt?
I did not notice problems with the salts per
se.
It is not anything I sought to quantify or even test.
I was not aware of any conservation problems
related specifically to salt.
It was more related to water, mud, and rust.
That it. Thank you.