by Sonya Barron, Collections Conservator, Iowa State University Library Deb Lewis, Curator, Ada Hayden Herbarium, EEOB, Iowa State University
Slide 1
My name is Sonya Barron. I am the Collections Conservator at the Iowa State University Library. In this presentation I would like to share with you about an exciting and enjoyable collaboration that I have been a part of for the past two years. I have been working together with a colleague on campus, Deb Lewis. She is the Curator of the Ada Hayden Herbarium. The Herbarium is a part of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology. The herbarium’s holdings currently number at 660,000 specimens.
In the last two years, I have been learning to take care of the library’s holdings of botanical specimens according to best preservation practices for such natural history collections. In turn, I have been able to advise Deb on archival storage materials that are needed for long-term preservation of the herbarium’s many thousands of specimens. After all, both plants and paper are made up of cellulose building blocks, so the basic principles of preserving them are similar.
First, let me give you a bit of background information about the Ada Hayden Herbarium on the Iowa State University Campus.
Slide 2
First off, an introduction to what herbariums are
A herbarium is a natural history museum of samples, or specimens, of dried plants or plant parts, fungi, lichens, algae and other groups traditionally included in the field of “botany”.
The specimens are appropriately dried and prepared for the herbarium, using archival materials like papers, boxes, adhesives and inks. The earliest known specimen at the Ada Hayden Herbarium is from 1785, and the oldest known specimens ever are from the 15th century. The Ada Hayden herbarium is the most comprehensive collection of Iowa plants and fungi in the world. It contains specimens that were collected in Iowa from the 1840s to the present.
The primary roles of herbaria are to 1) serve as a well-maintained repository 2) provide access and loans of specimens for direct study by researchers and 3) supply data for research and education.
The Ada Hayden Herbarium is part of a worldwide network of herbaria. Data from specimen labels and specimen images are uploaded to online open access databases that make the data and images globally available.
Slide 3
Let’s talk about what preservation looks like at a herbarium.
Best practices for mounting botanical specimens are similar to ones used, when repairing and preserving archival paper materials.
After the plants are dried and quarantined, they are mounted onto acid-free pure cotton fiber paper. The plants are attached to the paper using pH neutral adhesive, as well as linen thread or fragments of linen adhesive tape, where necessary.
Seeds and other plant fragments are placed into little acid-free paper envelopes, which are adhered to the mounting paper, along with the identifying label, stamp or barcode.
Slide 4
Mounted specimens are organized into appropriate folders, which are called genus covers. Genus covers fit perfectly onto shelves of herbarium cabinets. Very thick 3-dimensional specimens, such as mushrooms or branches with pinecones, can be stored in flat boxes or in packets. Packets are labeled and stacked into boxes of a matching size.
Slide 5
Folders and boxes are stored in metal cabinets that are specifically built for herbariums. The storage environment needs to be cool and dry, just like in an archive or a special collections area.
Slide 6
Like books and documents, historic botanical specimens suffer from deterioration and experience physical condition problems. Historic mounting papers were not always made from pure cotton fibers. They can become yellowed and brittle. The papers easily tear when they are handled or when they curve around highly 3-dimensional specimens. Oftentimes adhesive fails in areas where the plant is thickest or heaviest.
Slide 7
What are preservation activities that happen at a herbarium? Newly dried and prepared specimens need to be mounted and labeled, then housed and stored in the appropriate location. A consistent effort and much strategizing is always going on to bring all parts of the herbarium collection up to standards of best preservation practices. By this I mean trying to re-house all collections in archival housings. Historic specimens need to be periodically examined for physical condition problems. Damage to plants and papers needs to be repaired.
Slide 8
The herbarium is not unlike a reading room in a special collections area. It’s a place of scientific study, where students, professors and researchers outside of the campus community can come to examine plants. Admission is by appointment. Microscopes are available to look at plants under magnification.
Not unlike a library or an archive, the herbarium supports open access initiatives by providing free access to high resolution, professional quality digital images of items from its collections.
Slide 9
Digitization of specimens and data entry are ongoing projects that staff and students contribute to daily. The images of plants and the identifying scientific data are uploaded to consortia portals. Through these database portals the information can be accessed free of charge by scientists and plant enthusiasts from all over the world.
Slide 10
Now let’s switch gears and take a look at archival collections that include botanical specimens. Iowa State University Library has a number of collections related to botanists with either a connection to the state of Iowa, or to the university. Somehow, a small number of botanical specimens ended up at the archives instead of the Herbarium, where the vast majority of such materials are preserved. Custodial arrangements for collections on campus can sometimes be confusing to trace and to figure out. One such example is the collection of a prominent botanist Charles Christopher Parry. A longtime resident of Davenport, IA, Parry traveled on several expeditions to the Western territories as a surgeon and botanist. He was passionate about plants and made lasting friendships with many renowned botanists of his time, like Asa Gray, John Torrey and George Englemann.
Slide 11
The C.C. Parry Papers went through a fair bit of back and forth between the ISU library and the herbarium. Parry’s plant specimen collection and his field notebooks were purchased for the Iowa State College herbarium in 1894. That same year, Parry’s personal letters were incorporated into the university library’s general collection. In 1969, when the Special Collections department was created at the library, Parry’s correspondence was transferred there. Finally, in the early 1990s Parry’s field notebooks were transferred from the herbarium to the library’s special collections. Parry’s entire collection of field notebooks and correspondence was digitized at the library’s preservation department in 2018.
Slide 12
The digital images of Parry’s journals and scans of his letters were uploaded onto the library’s website as a digital collection in 2019. We are hoping that someday in the future we will be able to make digital links between Parry’s travel notes, his drawings and the plant specimens that he collected.
Slide 13
The small number of botanical specimens that occasionally end up in archives and libraries could either be preserved there or transferred to the institution’s herbarium on permanent loan. The arrangement may depend on whether the specimens represent scientific research value. These options are a part of discussions that takes place between the archivist and the herbarium curator. Botanical and other scientific specimens can come to the library in many shapes and formats. They are usually sprinkled in among the paper-based archival collections. Oftentimes these specimen groups do not appear to be well organized or complete.
Slide 14
Sometimes plants and flowers are collected as a leisure activity and pressed between pages of books, diaries or letters. In this situation, we have encapsulated the dried plant fragments in Mylar, after placing them on a piece of thin cotton blotter. The Mylar encapsulations can be labeled with the page number, where they were encountered, and with any accompanying identifying information. After being labeled in this way, the encapsulations can be put into a separate folder and housed with the book, inside the same box. In this way the stiff Mylar pocket would not damage the book’s pages, and the plant fragments would be protected from breakage or loss.
In the case of the Charles Parry’s notebook, which you can see on the right hand side of the slide, the tiny plant fragments have pretty much melded with the page. It’s hard to say whether they were intentionally attached with adhesive or if they became unintentionally attached to the page by the plant’s “juices”. Either way, these delicate fragments were adhered securely enough to leave them in place.
Slide 15
At the library, I have encountered specimens on loose sheets of paper and in bound herbarium albums. In both formats, the plants are usually only on one side of the sheet, and are attached using adhesive and tiny fragments of white linen tape. Sometimes the loose sheets are pages that had been ripped out of a herbarium album. This is evidenced by a ripped edge on one side of the page, as well as a stamped or handwritten page number in the upper corner. At other times the single sheets were meant to be loose and stored in a portfolio with ties.
Both formats of botanical specimens show similar condition problems: partially detached plants and labels, missing labels, failing adhesive and tape. The paper is often brittle, discolored and has tears. I repair these materials in a way that is similar to the method used at the herbarium. I use small dabs of wheat starch paste to reattach partially detached plant parts.
In this album, some of the plant parts were loose and stuck in the page fold of the album. Sometimes, I could determine the placement of a fragment because of a distinct brown impression left by it on the paper. I reattached those fragments with wheat starch paste. This reminded me of matching glue stains on historic scrapbook pages with glue stains on the backs of detached photos.
Other times, it was less clear where the fragment ought to go. In those cases, I constructed a small pocket from archival bond paper and placed the fragments inside it. The pocket could be attached to the page with paste or gently inserted into the page fold at the spine of the album. I repair the mounting papers in the same way I repair most paper: Japanese paper mends adhered with wheat starch paste. I rehouse the loose specimen sheets in archival paper folders.
Slide 16
If I look at the herbarium albums as book structures, I see some unique handling challenges.
Herbarium albums frequently have a wedge shape. That’s just how they are made to allow for added bulk of specimens. A wedge-shaped book is impractical and awkward to shelve. In order to comfortably join its neighbors on the library shelf, a herbarium album often needs a wedge-shaped spacer inside its enclosure to fill up the empty space.
Another feature of these album structures is that the pages have a more pronounced curve than usual, when the album is opened. This is a normal thing for book pages to do, but herbarium album pages need to remain totally flat so that the plants don’t break. The dried plants cannot bend, since they are brittle and delicate. One may need a book cradle or book wedges, as well as light weights, in order to support a herbarium album during handling. You can see one such set-up on the right hand side of the slide.
Slide 17
This is an example of how loose specimens can exist in the archives. What are these plants? Why are they here? How do they go together? Do they go together? A botany expert can shed light on this situation. By providing contextual information, they can help enhance accessibility of the collection for the user.
On top of the album that I described in the previous slide, there was a stack of cardboard, held together with rusty paper clips. In between the sheets of cardboard, there were loose dried plants. Similar-looking plants were grouped together on the same sheet of cardboard. The labels were all clustered together towards the bottom of the stack. It was not clear to ME which label referred to which group of plants. All herbarium labels are in Latin. This was the perfect opportunity to contact Deb and ask for help.
I brought the stack of cardboard over to the herbarium, so that she could take a look. Deb showed me how to package the dried plants into a traditional plant collector’s stack:
-The plants are interleaved with pieces of newspaper
-2 thick sheets of corrugated cardboard go on the top and on the bottom of the sandwich.
-The whole stack is tied together with a long piece of cotton twill tape, using a slip knot, which holds it together nice and tight. She gave me that stylish red cotton twill tape that you can see in the slide.
Within 5 minutes of examining the contents of the stack, Deb matched all the labels to the plants. Some of the plants did not have labels at all, but Deb could name the species. The plants were now organized and ready for appropriate mounting onto sheets of paper. I would do that later at the library’s preservation lab.
There were 2 mosses and 1 lichen in this stack. They were clumped together on the same sheet of cardboard. Deb separated the clump into 3 distinct specimens.
Slide 18
We took the specimens over to the microscope and examined them und er magnification. The examination confirmed that these were in fact three totally different plants. They were not associated with any labels or notes. The piece of cardboard they were on had an inscription in graphite that read “Mosses, 1870’s”. Deb shared with me that one of her fellow botanists at the department could easily identify them under magnification. I think I might take advantage of that generous offer.
So, there are many obvious differences between a library reading room and a herbarium. Plants vs. documents, botanical albums vs. rare books, etc. One such difference is less obvious, but nonetheless it is crucial. If you are an able-sighted person, when you come into a reading room, you can access information by reading the words, provided you know the language in which they are written. You can look at the photographs and interpret images. But in a herbarium, in order to study a plant’s identifying features, you need to be able to see them under magnification. You need a microscope to make those scientific observations. This is why it makes sense for specimens of significant scientific value to be preserved and stored at a herbarium, where a researcher can have access to appropriate tools and equipment.
Slide 19
The identifying features of mosses can be found in many different parts of the plant. To examine all the sources of information in a moss sample under magnification, a botanist usually needs to turn it over. This is not necessarily true of all plants. That’s why some plants are mounted on a sheet of paper with adhesive to expose one side of the plant only, while others are stored in packets, so that all sides of the plant can be visible.
Slide 20
Another interesting thing that I learned about herbarium collections is that they can include scientific illustrations. On this slide are examples of the work of Laura Morgan, a prolific, skilled and inspired illustrator of mushrooms. Laura was the wife of renowned mycologist A. P. Morgan, who created illustrations for many of his books. A mycologist is a botanist who studies mushrooms, or fungi.
Now, why would you illustrate mushrooms in particular? As Deb pointed out, dried mushroom specimens look nothing like they did, when they were first collected. Before color photography and digital imaging, the appearance of mushrooms had to be captured in a different way. The mycologist would have to make a detailed illustration of the mushroom before it started changing. The mushrooms would then have to be dried in a specific way and preserved in packets.
In fact, Deb first sought me out for a consultation because of these Laura Morgan illustrations. Deb and a student assistant working at the herbarium wanted to rehouse the illustrations in archival quality folders and boxes. I recommended the materials, products and suppliers that would be appropriate. I also made a protective sink mat for an oversized painting of this beautiful orange mushroom. This illustration had to be stored separately because it was much larger than the other illustrations.
Slide 21
Switching back to the libraries and archives. There are other methods of preserving botanical specimens, which are different from a herbarium’s scientific approach. This group of dried plants is a part of the Sarah Underwood Collection. Sarah, who went by Sally, was a native Rhode Islander, who moved to eastern Iowa for a number of years after getting married. She and her husband lived about two miles outside of Princeton, Iowa, near Davenport. The majority of the collection is correspondence: Sally’s letters to family and friends. One of the mailing envelopes was full of dried flowers that Sally had collected near her homestead. The delicate stems, leaves and blooms were loose and mixed up, with no labels, descriptions or individual packets. It is not likely that Sally’s interest in collecting these was scientific. Once the plant materials were removed from the envelope, they were laid out on a sheet of white paper for examination.
Slide 22
This project was handled by my predecessor, book and paper conservator Dr. Melissa Tedone, who is now working and teaching at the University of Delaware. It was decided that these botanical materials should be preserved in a storage/display mat. This presentation and housing solution is common in museum collections. Some techniques for preservation of natural history collections were used in this mat as well. The plants were adhered to thin cotton blotter, using wheat starch paste. I cannot say for sure how the plants are grouped together in the mat’s individual windows. But I suspect that Dr. Tedone consulted someone with knowledge of plants to advise her on how to organize these fragments. I am assuming that each mat window displays one type of plant. Not being a local, I did not know that Iowa used to be abbreviated as IOA, as can be seen in this slide on the envelope’s postmark.
In this slide you can see how the images of the plants, the storage mat and the envelope can be viewed in Content DM, the digital image viewing platform that was used at the library. Each window in the mat can be viewed as a separate image. I should note that the library is transitioning to using Islandora, along with other Regents Institutions – University of Iowa and Northern Iowa University.
Slide 23
Here is a close-up of an individual mat window, which provides a great deal of detail, texture and a vivid sense of materiality for the viewer. The letter on the right hand side is one that Sarah Underwood wrote to one of her sisters. The staining from other pressed flowers can be seen on the paper, which is true of many of her letters. However, those flowers did not survive through the many decades.
Slide 24
I want to switch gears again and say that there are other natural history collections that make their way to archives and libraries. Take, for instance, this group of microscope slides that were part of the collection of Iowa-born entomologist Hortense Butler-Heywood. She is best known for co-authoring the book “Handbook of the Dragonflies of North America” in 1929.
This was a difficult set of materials to assess and preserve. The slides were very dusty. Many of them did not have much left on them except for the binding medium, which was cracked and flaking. Some of the slides were missing labels. There were also insect debris and loose labels floating around the wooden slide storage boxes.
Butler-Heywood’s handwriting was not easy to decipher, so I often relied on Wikipedia to identify what species were represented on the slides. In retrospect, I should have contacted somebody from the Department of Entomology, but hindsight is always 20/20, isn’t it? Thankfully, the preservation lab has several lightboxes, which I used to examine the specimens over transmitted light.
Slide 25
The specimen slides came to the library stored in wooden boxes with slots. The box lids were labeled faintly in pencil. The inscriptions were in Latin and included the year and the name of the insect species. It looked a whole lot like Butler-Heywood’s handwriting. However, inside the boxes, the species were all mixed up. I know that maintaining original order is one the tenets of archival practice, even if “original” means “the way they came to the archive”. However, in this case, the order of the slides was extremely confusing and seemed to conflict with the author’s labeling scheme. Thankfully, the inscriptions on the boxes had already been deciphered and recorded in the archival finding aid. This was a big help, as you can see in the list on this slide.
After several conversations with Amy Bishop, Manuscripts and Rare Books Archivist, we decided to store the slides for each type of insect in the box labeled with their name and the year it was collected . The blank slides and loose insect debris were discarded. The loose labels were left in the corresponding boxes, in a blank slot. Fortunately, once the slides were grouped in this way, the dates on the labels seemed more logical. Heywood-Butler appeared to dedicate a separate chunk of time to the study of each type of insect.
Slide 26
Information on the labels became part of the metadata associated with the images. Together with Digital Services Coordinator Mindy McCoy, we photographed the slides and edited the photos. I staged the slides in the correct order, then laid each slide on top of the lightbox and photographed it with a digital SLR camera mounted on a copy stand. I used the fluorescent light setting and the maximum image size setting for the camera. Mindy edited the images in Photoshop and saved them as TIFFs, using the catalog number in the filename.
I first tried imaging the slides with a specialized camera mounted onto a microscope. Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts and setting changes, the images came out blurry, dull and totally unsatisfying. Another option was to use the Creo transparency scanner. The images came out very well, but the speed of scanning was so excruciatingly slow, I just couldn’t take it. I guess that’s mostly testimony to my lack of patience, not to the working properties of the scanner. It’s a great piece of equipment. You just need to have the patience of saint to operate it. Or you need to have a really good book to read while you are scanning.
Slide 27
Each digital object for this collection includes an overall image of the microscope slide and a separate image of its label. The images of the slides are mixed into the Butler-Heywood digital collection alongside paper-based materials like drawings, documents, letters, journals and photographs.
Slide 28
So, to recap this slightly rambling presentation, I would like to reiterate that when you are charged with preserving library and archives collections, learning new things is inevitable. Collaboration is key to successful outcomes, when working with unconventional, ‘out of the box’ archival collections. A variety of expertise are needed to tackle issues of unusual formats, as well as the overlapping contexts of science and history. For those of us on university campuses, it’s pretty easy to find people who can help us fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Nobody should be required to know everything, or to learn everything from books and online resources. Why reinvent the wheel? Talking to people really works, I tell you.
Stepping out of one’s comfort zone and engaging in collaborations with people outside of our immediate professional circle can help build bridges and relationships. These bridges can be a source of strength to our institutions.
If your institution is not positioned in the midst of an environment that is teeming with a variety of experts, it might be more challenging to locate the appropriate people in your area to reach out to. Consulting with an expert or colleague over the phone is another great option. And, of course, I don’t want to minimize the importance of independent research and study. While learning to work with botanical specimens, I consulted some helpful, easy-to-understand resources that Deb recommended to me. You can see the titles in this slide. It has been a wonderful adventure to delve into the world of plants and plant collectors. Thank you for taking the time to listen to my presentation. I wish everyone well, good bye.