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RARA-AVIS: Pulp Preservation 

I thought list members would be interested in these items -- especially 
the first one -- from Infobits, a mailing list of information technology. 
 (I've included subscription info for InfobitsPULP FICTION PRESERVATION

Although several library digitization projects are concentrating on
making rare and precious books and manuscripts available to scholars in
electronic form, high-tech preservation is also essential for less
lofty literature. The paper used in printing 19th- and 20th-century
mass market fiction has a high acid content and is rapidly
deteriorating, despite careful handling in libraries. Scholars and
devotees of pulp fiction will eventually be able to access several
collections of these materials thanks to two current preservation
projects.

>From 1855 through the 1950s, Street & Smith published a variety of dime
novels, pulp magazines, and comic books. The firm operated as a
"fiction factory" with a stable of writers, including Horatio Alger,
Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London, whose pseudonymous,
formulaic works included graphics by such illustrators as Winfield
Scott, Tom Lovell, Anton Otto Fisher, Amos Sewell, and N.C. Wyeth. A
$250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
Division of Preservation and Access is funding the Syracuse University
Street & Smith Archives Preservation and Access Project for a two-year
period to microfilm and catalogue the Street & Smith Publishing
Company's archives. Many of the original materials, such as colored
covers from serials and novels, will also receive conservation
treatment to preserve them for future study. 

For more details on the scope and progress of this project, see the
Syracuse University Street & Smith Archives Preservation and Access
Project Web site at http://web.syr.edu:80/~speccoll/street1.htm

The Virginia Tech Speculative Fiction (VTSF) Project, begun in August
1994, is an "experiment in recovering and preserving text and graphic
materials related to speculative fiction, including fiction originally
published in science fiction and fantasy magazines dating from the
earliest periods of 20th-century American and British fantastic
fiction." In this project the original magazines are scanned, creating
master document files with both text and graphic elements. Files are
formatted for Web display with HTML tagging, with links made from
tables of contents to the individual textual and graphical items,
arranged by magazine and issue. 

For more details and to view the issues completed and available on the
Web, link to the Virginia Tech Speculative Fiction homepage at
http://athena.english.vt.edu/vtsfpilot/SF-Project.html at the end.)



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++ Patrick Golden ++ Program Services Manager ++ pgolden@leo.vsla.edu 
++ Williamsburg Regional Library ++ Virginia ++ http://www.wrl.org

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