All Your Shreds Are Belong To Us

14 12 2011

I’m always interested in stories about merging new technologies and old, analog and digital, human and computer teams.  Here’s a good one:  DARPA ran a contest last month, with a $50,000 prize,  in which contestants were asked to use technologies to re-assemble shredded documents. The winning team, All Your Shreds Are Belong To Us, “used custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification.   In total, the winning team spent nearly 600 man-hours developing algorithms and piecing together documents that were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces.”    Here are some photos.   The forum discussions look pretty interesting.

Yeah, I think that type of help could come in handy for re-assembling  letters destroyed by iron-gall ink such as those in my photo above.  And I’d like to know more about those mysterious “human assemblers” and their techniques!


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Categories : art conservation, New technologies

A 24 minute Ode to Mylar

12 06 2010

This video is so good for so many different reasons – the lab equipment, the chemical handling, the helpful women in hotpants, the industrial hopes and dreams! Enjoy!


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Categories : New technologies, Tape is Evil

Boggles The Mind

3 02 2010

Dan Cull asked about sci-fi and conservation and reminded me that it might be time to revisit Technovelgy, so off I went and found this:

Self-folding Origami is basically all about how DARPA is doing research into shape-shifting materials, a merger of material and computer so that an object is not limited by it’s original form or purpose.  Form follows function?  Not really.

This whole article is mind-boggling to me, for so many reasons.  First, that the government is doing this research.  Second…well…the matrix is real?  There is no spoon?

Here are some excerpts from the AFCEA article.  Note the use of the term “infochemistry”.  Now that’s a point of interest for library/chemistry geeks, isn’t it?

Although the concept of self-forming matter smacks of science fiction, Zakin says that considerable progress has been made in proving the technology’s underlying science. Developing programmable matter is also its own new field of study: infochemistry, which blends several different sciences such as chemistry, information theory and control engineering to build information directly into materials.

An important part of infochemistry is what Zakin describes as mesomatter, the particles needed to build structures….Not only does this combination of data and material allow for dynamic flexibility in creating structures, but he says that it can potentially create new states of matter. Conventional materials can transition from liquids to solids, but these new “infomaterials” can have infosolids, where the matter is solid and its information is localized; “infoliquids” where both the material and information are flowing, and any number of combinations in between.

WOWcool, huh?  They are manipulating DNA strands, enzyme reactions, and playing with something called molecular Velcro and other methods of adhesion.  Contemplate the possibilities.  Consider that Phase 3, application development, is supposed to start in about a year. Amazing.  Get ready.


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Categories : New technologies

Get Out Your Umbrellas

30 06 2009

It’s going to be raining loose pages.  The Espresso Book Machine, available for lease for a mere $1500/month to bookstores everywhere (according this Boston Globe article) prints, trims and perfect binds books on demand all in a machine about the size of an old-style copy machine.  No fanning of pages, just milling on one pass and rollering glue on another.

I, for one, will be working on my dfa rebind skills.  I predict a repeat of the early days of binding – people will buy an unbound book and bring it to US for fancifying for their shelves.

Or not.  My library is about to embark on a book digitization project for which we do not have to pay, and I’m pretty sure the resulting POD books will be created in a manner similar to this.  Do I have the ability to influence the way in which they are bound?  Probably not.  Will I reject the project? Nope.

Here is an interesting blog post from IF on the topic, the most intriguing aspect of which, to me, is the possibility of personal customization of book covers.

And here is what Gary Frost has to say.


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Tomorrow’s Ephemera Today

23 01 2009

Something called Paper Camp took place this past weekend in London, and some very interesting experiments were performed.   This person blogged about it.  I kind of wish I had been there, but my brain might have exploded from all the creativity, so it’s probably safer that I wasn’t.

However.  Prepare to deal with this in the conservation lab of the future.  Or of next week.


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Categories : art, New technologies

Writing Implements of the Future

6 11 2008

Researchers at Osaka University have come up with a pen that “writes” at the atomic level.  The folks at sci-fi/technology site Technovelgy, who paid to read the full article at Science Magazine, say “The process replaces individual atoms of tin with silicon”. Plus they cite Bladerunner.

So, I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking: How would that be useful in conservation work?  Can it use other elements?  Can we use it for lead-white conversion? Careful placement of chelators?  Do I have to wait 50 years to get one?  Will there be an i-pen version?  Could we use the drawing tools in GIMP? 0h – and we could sign our work in super secret ways, and future historians would write dissertations on the evolution of binder’s tickets, macro to micro.

Ooooh.  Who knows the power of the pen?


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Categories : New technologies

Ooooh. Microscopy.

17 10 2008

I miss having a microscope.  Here are the National Geographic Best Microscopic Images. This one is Japanese Paper


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Categories : art, New technologies, Uncategorized

Shoestrings and Scanners, or how to create a digitization program on the cheap

29 05 2008

So, we are in the midst of planning and fundraising for a comprehensive preservation and access program for the library. In the meantime, there is a mandate to start scanning everything we own. We have a couple of very dedicated volunteers, an Epson scanner, a computer and a RAID. And me. No adequate database, no money to make one, still researching what to get and how it will integrate with library and museum automated systems and OCLC. I’m following up on an earlier post’s comment to look at some open source stuff. And we’re looking at which NHPRC, NEH and IMLS grants would be best to go for. Very little intellectual control – for instance, just the other day, while looking for documentation of an 1868 first ascent of Long’s Peak, I came across some lantern slides of a rare SES Allen map of Lake Louise that another patron had requested. Neither of these items are documented in our archives lists at all.

But still, there are people who want to see what we’ve got, right now. I am happy to announce that we now have a way to get small numbers of things into the eager eyes of climbers everywhere. Our intrepid volunteers have scanned about 100 slides from the Lt. Nawang Kapadia Himalaya Collection, donated to the AAC by Harish Kapadia. I used Picasa to gather up the tiffs, do some QA and make them into jpgs, and added a Flickr Uploadr button to Picasa. And following in the giant footsteps of The Commons project, we started a Flickr page for your viewing pleasure. And then backup to the RAID.

There are about 1500 color slide Kapadia photographs of various peaks and people of the Himalaya. I am hoping to spend some time networking in the flickr climbing community so that we get a bunch of tagging and commenting action, leading back, eventually to Google Earth, our OPAC, and other social networking stuff. Check back on the flickr page to see more as they are slowly scanned. It takes about an hour to scan and QA 15 slides in a matrix. Someday we’ll get a slide stack loader and a Nikon Coolscan, and we will be faster. We’ll also be scanning our collections of lantern slides, film negatives, and photographs – as usual – all mountains, all the time. I’m looking forward to seeing what we’ve got!


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Categories : New technologies, what we do

Archivists in Second Life

17 02 2008

While I have always been curious about and appreciative of the Second Life evolution, I’ve not been too interested in putting any time into exploring it. My First Life is time-consuming enough. I’m starting to see, though, that there will eventually be no such thing as a disparity between the life we lead in what we consider “real” time and the things we do on-line. I’m getting more interested in participating, especially since things like THIS are starting to happen – digitized archives presented on the Information Archipelago of Second Life. This is where true innovation is happening for things like networking and marketing. This is where we can create new audiences and find new methods of fund-raising and outright selling of services. I am starting to envision ways to use this in my new job. Hmmmm. You may be witnessing the start of a new obsession on my part. Or maybe not – I’ll be moving in the next few weeks and then starting a new demanding job. Stay tuned.


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Categories : New technologies

Science Fiction and Conservation

7 12 2007

Every once in a while I come across an article that sends me into my own little sci-fi world where I have all the world and time to tinker with new technologies- along with a miraculously improved understanding of chemistry and physics. I daydream about various ways nanotech can change our work (the way we do it and the things we will have to work on). There’s the fantasy of setting loose a bunch of nanobots to eat stubborn adhesive. I’m not really a trekkie, but I do like the idea of using the Replicator to make a whole new version of whatever burnt, crispy document I might have on hand. And what are we going to do, exactly, about bio-lumenescent art, e-inks, and all the new forms of paper, drawing and writing implements that will be coming our way?

The Tate, of course, does an inspiring job of confronting conservation of time-based and other strangely-behaved media. That’s a whole other conversation.

What I really want to talk about is this:

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1332

Imagine my happiness to find a website devoted to science fiction made real!

The article cited above discusses implantation of “fluorescent polymer microbeads ” to create a diagnostic tattoo in human skin. It also mentions RFID ink, to be used for tagging animals. Why can we not use these things? Invisible RFID ink has its’ obvious applications for marking and retrieving things, so I’m not going to go very far discussing it because I’m sure someone, somewhere, is on it. If it can be used to find a soldier wandering in the desert, surely it can be used to find a book in a library, right?

But microbead implants? Tattoos for paper! What could we detect in paper? Could they be inserted into paper and then withdrawn as needed? If yes, then maybe they could indicate the presence or absence of all kinds of stuff when we treat, or contemplate treating, paper. Lignin, pH, solvents, stain reduction agents? Changes in pigment due to treatment? What would it do to paper over time? Nothing? Horrible unforeseen consequences?

Oh, if I only had a lab. And a bigger brain.

Ironically enough, looking at the original Texas A&M article, I noted this:

“This invention is protected under U.S. Patent No. 6,485,703 issued November 26, 2002. The A&M System Technology Licensing Office is currently seeking one or more industrial partners to facilitate commercialization of the procedure. For more information about licensing this technology, please contact Page Heller at p-heller@tamu.edu or 979-847-8682. Please reference TAMUS Project #1240.”

The contact person’s last name is Heller. Mine too. Welcome to the Twilight Zone. doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo…


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