[PADG:1746] Cleaning up after Demco Fastape

["Normandy Helmer" <nhelmer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A colleague has asked about dealing with materials that had been repaired
with Demco Fastape. As you are probably all aware, the adhesive turns into a
gritty dust. She's concerned about the potential for damage to nearby books
by the residue, and needs to know if this deserves priority project status.
It's a mid-sized academic research library.

In my experience, use of the tape dates from a time when we did really bad
repairs,  books patched with this stuff were pretty worn by heavy
circulation to begin with, and as boards and spine are usually trashed they
need significant treatment to look reasonable again. In general, we've done
commercial rebind rather than repair them. I put replacement of acidic
pamphlet binders as a much higher priority than tape remediation.

I didn't find anything on CoOL about the components of the adhesive, and
would appreciate any information about the impact of the residue, nifty
fixes, and thoughts about priority.

Thanks

Normandy Helmer
Coordinator of Preservation & Digital Services/
Oregon Newspaper Project
University of Oregon Libraries--SpecColl
1299 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1299
541-346-1864/fax 541-346-1882
nhelmer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx