Now that you have been introduced to the Fragment Project in my blog, let me take a step back and focus more on the nature of the fragments and where they are coming from. Fragments are pieces of an item in different sizes and shapes that got detached from it for various reasons. This is called dissociation and it is one of the agents of deterioration that cultural heritage faces. In library collections, this can happen due to the fragile condition of the paper, or because the binding was not steady enough to hold all the pages together or maybe because of wear and tear of the volume among other things. The fact is that fragments can vary from a small piece of a page, or one entire page, or even few pages from the book. While these fragments do come from all subject areas present in the General Collection, this blog will focus on a particular collection from which the majority of the fragments derive and whose nature of the books and pamphlets made them more vulnerable to damage and losses.
The P4 Collection (an abbreviation for Priority 4 Collection) consists of over 75,000 items acquired by the Library of Congress during the 1920s and 1930s for which only minimal catalog records exist. It is a collection covering every subject matter in many languages, in fact, a microcosm of the overall General Collection. There is quite a number of unique pieces in this collection. Most materials are in European languages – Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, German, and English, though some Nordic languages, Russian, and even Japanese and Vietnamese items have been discovered – and the majority dates to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many pamphlets or books in Eastern European languages reflect publishing after World War I when many countries were newly independent. The poor quality of the paper and bindings reflects the publishing conditions of the period.
Due to space constraints on Capitol Hill, this collection was stored at our storage facility in Landover, Maryland for decades under less-than-ideal environmental conditions. Once the time came to transfer this material to our state-of-the art off-site storage facility at Fort Meade with the best preservation conditions for library and archival material, a massive project had to be carried out to address the thousands of items of the P4 Collection. So, in 2008 the Collections Officer of the Collection Management Division (former CALM Division) started a large-scale preservation project in order to improve the physical condition of these P4 items, especially the most fragile ones. The project included a needs assessment for