Prepping Newspapers For The Runway (part 1)

Part 5 of The Library Chronicles
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So after getting rid of the glue, string, binding and other assorted pieces of debris off the newspaper and turning it into a larger stack of unbound, musty, loose newspaper pages, I was ready to move on to the next step.

Prepping the newspaper for microfilming.

Warning: What I'm about to describe is not, repeat, not for the faint of heart. This should not be read if you're even the teeny bit tired. This should be read during the day, on a empty stomach, when you're full of energy. Seriously, what I'm about to describe to you, will make watching synchronized swimming seem thrilling and suspenseful.

I brought my fifteen+ pounds of newspaper over to my work area and proceeded to execute what 75% of my job duties were for the first four years of career. These steps were deviated from only when the condition of the newspaper required it.

I completely forgot to mention what I did prior to arriving what I'm about to cover in this post, so I will now devote a few words to that particular topic.

Prior to the decommissioning and destroying of a typical volume of newspaper, I did the microfilm programming of said volume. This entailed taking out a calendar for the date range of the newspaper (we had calendars covering 1790 through 1990) and reading the first issue in said volume. To be precise, I read the front page (masthead) and the second page (publisher's statement) to determine the frequency of publication. Once that was determined (daily, weekly, bi-weekly, tri-weekly, daily plus saturday, daily plus sunday), it was the matter of marking on the calendar what days the newspaper published on. More on the calendar issue later.

Anyways, back to the newspaper. Once I brought it back to my work area, I got out the various implements that I would be using to prepare the newspaper for microfilming:

1} Pencil
2} Calendar (remember later? this is later)
3} Pad of paper
4} Micro spatula
5} Scotch tape
6} A bone shaper
7} A razor

Also, if the paper was in extremely poor condition and very old, there was special archival tape that was used to repair said newspaper.

And the deviation? If the newspaper was extremely new (less than 10 years old) and stored in a folded condition (in other words, the way you get your daily non-tabloid shaped newspaper), it had the mother of all creases. These fold creases had to be smoothed out so that it could be filmed properly.

Thus, we used a spray bottle, a clothes iron and ridiculously large manual press. Unless we had a lot to do or if the paper wasn't in good enough condition to handle the press. Then we used a humidifier and a paper rack covered in plastic sheeting to get rid of the creases.

Once that was all said and done, then we moved on to part 3 of our story, which brings us to this post. But since I probably made your eyelids heavy from reading this incredibly exciting post, I will end it here for now and say, "WAKEY, WAKEY!!!"
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Up next: Prepping Newspapers For The Runway (part 2)