The Dr John Green Collection at the Worcester Public Library

If you’ve seen my previous post, you know that Dr John Green donated 7,000 volumes to the city of Worcester for the purpose of establishing a public library.

By the time of his death in 1865, he had donated 5,000 more. Dr Green deliberately shaped his collection to represent the interests and concerns of 19th century New Englanders and his donation encompasses a broad range of topics and genres, including theology, contemporary politics and social issues, spiritualism, the sciences, art, music, travel, history and biography. While each individual volume is a treasure in itself, the value of the collection as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, in that it reflects the social and cultural values of the world in which it was created.

Over the past 160 years the Green books have inevitably suffered the ravages of time; water damage, light damage, brittle paper, degraded leather, torn pages, detached bindings, and dirt, dirt, dirt. Library staff in the past have attempted to address these issues by gluing, taping, re-binding, wrapping, tying, and enclosing vulnerable items. Some of these methods are just plain bad (scotch tape for example); others are merely inadequate by today’s standards. A few especially valuable items have been sent for full-scale conservation at the New England Document Conservation Center, but that level of treatment is too expensive to be a viable option for the collection as a whole.

So, what can the library do to preserve this precious legacy? In 2017, WPL received a $30,000 grant from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners to stabilize a small portion of the Dr John Green collection over a period of two years. These funds enabled us to purchase approximately 1,500 custom-made, state-of the art archival- quality boxes to house items in particular need of protection. Once selected, each volume was carefully measured for the best fit possible, then gently cleaned, boxed and returned to the shelf. This is in line with the conservative “first do no harm” philosophy of most contemporary book conservators.

  

What next? The 1,500 items re-housed as part of the Green collection preservation project, represent a small component of WPL’s historic collections as a whole We hope to use the enthusiasm and knowledge we’ve acquired in the past two years to generate an ongoing commitment stabilizing, conserving, and where appropriate, digitizing these irreplaceable materials for the benefit of future generations. 

Care to learn more? Please visit our exhibit on Dr John Green and his collection, which will run until September 30 2019 on the 1^st floor of the main library, and feel free to call Joy Hennig, Local History and Genealogy Librarian, at 508-799-1670 for further information.