A quick post to share a completely random idea which worked for me. One of the things I need to learn to become a better bookbinder is to work with leather. Paring leather so that it will not be too bulky on your boards is a usual task. This had me a tad nervous - what if I dig too deep, or take off too much?

Yes, I have some scrap leather that I can use, but it's often still too thick to be a true substitute. Good, but not great. Slightly better is the idea I had today - paring citrus peel. Clementines, specifically. These days clementines have fairly thin skins. At least half the width of my scrap leather! So I practiced paring on them. I felt better about it: didn't ruin any valuable leather, think it was a bit more accurate and I now have candied citrus peel for my next sweet treat! :)

I wrote a piece over on my work blog that may be of interest to some of you. I took some time to write up the history of classification (in the library sense) and posted it to my blog.

A Brief History of Classification at TriviumRLG.

This is a re-working of a manual I created as the terminal assignment for a course I took in graduate school: “Basic Materials Repair” offered at Simmons College (Spring, 1999). Prof. Sheila Intner coordinated the class, and Todd Pattison of the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) in Andover, MA provided lessons in repairs, resources, tools and a great deal of fun!

I finally “re-discovered” my course materials in 2011 and set about re-creating the text and images electronically, in a format usable by today’s computers. I am also incorporating the suggestions made by Prof. Intner which would have made my ’97’ a full ‘100!’ I hope the formatting updates make this easier to use. It is my intention to take this piece by piece and add photographic images and video.

I am releasing this work under a Creative Commons license. I do so in the hopes that others may add their knowledge, experience and questions to make it a better resource - I am far from being a true expert in conservation! In a nutshell, you may use this work for non-commercial purposes - ie, you can’t make any money from it - as long as you give me credit for what I’ve created and release your new version with the same license. I credit Mr. Pattison for sharing his knowledge and expertise with my fellow students and I; all I ask is that you do the same. Thank you!

Basic Material Repair by Christine Manuel Connors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.