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Subject: Publications on cleaning book covers with dry ice

Publications on cleaning book covers with dry ice

From: William Minter <wminter>
Date: Friday, September 28, 2007
After a long, hard day of work, I was relaxing after midnight and
watched the History Channel's "Modern Marvels" about  freezing
technologies. I was about to fall asleep when I saw some guy using a
modified sandblaster to clean a book cover, but the tool was using
dry ice. I immediately woke up and saw the name COLDSWEEP. A search
of the internet found the website. Upon further examination, I was
pleasantly surprised to see the name of our dear friend and
colleague, Randy Silverman--wow!

Randy has written an article--see below--that discusses the
chemistry of smoke and soot, and the options that are currently
available to remove soot and smoke odor from book covers. The idea
of using dry ice to blast away paint and other residue from a
variety of surfaces has been widely used in industry. Randy used
that technology to clean over 300 old Record Books that had been in
a fire. There may be other uses for this technology in the field of
conservation?

>From the COLDSWEEP website:

    Cleaning Smoke Damaged Books
    Sevier County Courthouse
    Richfield, UT

    Coldsweep technicians cleaned hundreds of smoke damaged records
    after a courthouse fire left the books with a heavy coat of soot
    and smoke.

    Coldsweep worked with Utah Disaster Kleenup and Randy Silverman
    (Preservation Librarian) from the University of Utah to develop
    the book cleaning process that by all accounts was a huge
    success!

    Randy Silverman authored a paper describing the results of the
    book cleaning project which was published by the International
    Preservation News. Select the link below to read his paper.

    Fire and Ice: A Soot Removal Technique Using Dry Ice Blasting

William Minter Bookbinding and Conservation, Inc.
4364 Woodbury Pike
Woodbury, PA  16695
814-793-4020
Fax: 814-793-4045


                                  ***
                  Conservation DistList Instance 21:24
               Distributed: Saturday, September 29, 2007
                       Message Id: cdl-21-24-009
                                  ***
Received on Friday, 28 September, 2007

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