willywaldo:
The conservation effort — informally named “The Great Decant” — started on April 1, when the first tome, Volume 1 of Reeves’s “History of English Law,” printed in London in 1869, was taken from its place on shelf 1.1., in the Long Room’s upper gallery, which is closed to tourists. The book was dusted with a specially modified vacuum cleaner, it was measured, its physical condition was noted, and its details were checked against the Long Room’s catalog, written in 1872.
The book was then labeled with a radio-frequency identification tag and put in a bar-coded box — the first of more than 700,000 books, manuscripts, busts and other artifacts that will be relocated from the Old Library to a climate-controlled, off-campus storage facility.
If you haven’t seen the magnificent Long Room at Trinity College, go now. Starting in October 2023, it will be closed to the public for a three-year restoration project.