Security strips

At Kansas State, we use tattle tapes (3M) in the general collection.  I
do not like them.  The "ideal" is to place the strip in the spine of a
hardbound book.  Obviously, this won't work for paperbacks or even some
hardbounds, so the strips end up being placed between two pages.  Ouch!
These two pages then do not open completely, and the adhesive stains
through the paper.   When I worked in a bindery, we hated to run into
these strips with our trimmer.

And as for deterring theft, I believe the students bent on theft just
tear the wanted pages out of the book rather than steal the whole
volume.  If they were to steal the book, we might get it back at the end
of the semester.  We don't get torn out pages returned anonymously.

I highly recommend you *do not* use security strips in special
collections materials.

Jim
Preservation Librarian
Kansas State University

                                  ***
                   Conservation DistList Instance 8:3
                  Distributed: Tuesday, June 21, 1994
                        Message Id: cdl-8-3-008
                                  ***