The hospital for Ohio University’s aging materials is about a seven minute drive from campus.
The Annex, located at 205 Columbus Road, is the place where the scrapes are buffed and the wrinkles rubbed away in the sometimes hundred-year-old books acquired by the university’s Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections.
The Annex, also known as the Southeast Ohio Regional Depository, is led by Miriam Nelson, head of preservation, and her staff, who, after fixing the pieces, send them back to the Mahn Center on the fifth floor of Alden Library.
From the outside, the facility appears to be an ordinary office building, but a large room on the second floor quickly changes that distinction. This particular room, where most of the preserving is conducted, holds shelves and shelves of damaged books and artifacts. They serve as a sharp contrast to the machines who share the room, purchased to fix them.
“All of the machines and tools you see around the room serve some purpose in the preservation process, and are all utilized in a specific way,” said Nelson, who has been working at the Annex since 2012.
Some machines can slice just a sliver of a page of paper through a stack of papers as thick as a book. Others create foil labels for newly bound texts.
When a damaged book arrives at the Annex, it usually is to the point where it can no longer be handled by human hands. But with the intricate work of the Annex team, this damage is remedied.
For old books, rebinding the books is a popular concern. To do so, the team tears apart the book and about an eighth of an inch is cut from the pages to remove any binding glue or stitch holes left behind, Nelson said.
A new cover is then put in place, and the book is compressed for 24 hours.
“The preservation process performed by Nelson and her staff prolongs the lifespan of a treated book and ensures that it will remain accessible and usable to the OU community as well as to outside researchers for the long-term,” said Miriam Intrator, Special Collections librarian.
The university’s diary of Margaret Boyd, its first female graduate, required Nelson’s special attention.
“When the Margaret Boyd diary was sent to me, it was to the point where no one could even open it or read it,” Nelson said. “I had to hand-stitch the book’s binding back together to a point where the diary can now be handled and read.”
A lot of attention is devoted to preserving books, but papers are also rehabbed and collections organized at the facility.
“The collections we receive generally need to be reorganized or need a new form of housing,” Nelson said. “We attempt to keep as much of the original organization method as possible, but we do create new housing for the collections, such as new boxes.”
OU students don’t currently work in the annex, but the facility is always looking for help and accepts student applications, Nelson said.
The preservation department in the Annex operates off OU Libraries’ Preservation Endowment investment income, currently at $39,088, said Deborah Daniels, budget unit manager for OU Libraries. The money is used to fund student employees and new equipment, but it hasn’t been tapped into much in recent years, Daniels said.
“Miriam (Nelson) is helping us to prevent that by bringing in consultants and working with OU facilities to modify the air systems everywhere that we store our special and historical materials, both at the Mahn Center and at the Annex,” said University Archivist and Records Manager Bill Kimok.
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