A New Box Maker for the Conservation Division

The following is a post by Meg Gray, a Library Technician in the General Collections Conservation section of the Preservation Division.

The Conservation Division welcomed a brand new addition this Spring. As of February 4^th, we are now in possession of a new box making machine!

Every year, the Conservation Division creates thousands of custom housings for collection items in the form of boxes made from archival-quality board. These boxes can be for a huge variety of items – books, maps, globes— anything and everything housed in our collections that needs a more stable method of storage. Last year (2024-2025) alone, my section, General Collections Conservation, created over eleven thousand custom housings for general collections items as well as collections from our various liaison departments. We rehouse materials as part of the process of acquisitions and digitization. Some of the housings we create include clamshell made of corrugated board, four-flap boxes and wrappers make of 20-point board, and a variety of drop-front and top-loading boxes for more sensitive, fragile collections materials.

Our digital cutters are used not only by General Collections Conservation but also by the Conservation Division to create housings for such a wide array of collections as books, musical instruments, scrolls, maps, and even globes – every conceivable type of item owned by the Library.

The Library of Congress receives around 8000 new items per day. Some of these items are in digital format, but many are not, and as part of the process of maintaining our collections and managing our space constraints, we digitize items that have become too fragile for use. These items, however, frequently need to be housed to preserve them until they can be digitized. We’ve discussed this process in a past blog post, and it remains crucial to our operations. Our digital cutters, are an integral part of that process – as are the technicians who run them.

The man of the hour, Library Technician Rashad Penn, uses our digital cutters to create over 15,000 housings per year. Rashad has worked at the Library of Congress for over 15 years. Prior to transitioning to Conservation, he worked with the Collections Management Division as a library technician refiling books. Rashad also worked as a Material Handler at Fort Meade, retrieving and putting away collections and other major projects. He is in charge of doing periodic maintenance for the new machine and its older counterpart as part of his regular duties to help ensure our collections at the Library are safely housed and kept from harm and that our equipment is kept in good condition.

Our long-awaited new digital cutter allows for maximum productivity and flexibility in the types of boxes we can create. The machine can cut materials up to 110 mm (4.33 in) thick and is fully modular. Our staff are already excited about the increased speed combined with safety features and easy maintenance procedures of the new machine.

All technicians in the General Collections Conservation section are trained to use the digital cutters and each technician spends an average of four hours a week creating custom housings for their liaison divisions in addition to performing treatments on collections items. With the help of our new machine, we will be able to speed up the box making process this year.

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