Subject: Publications on cleaning book covers with dry ice
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