Preservation of books
A book is a set of written, printed, or blank pages fastened along one side and encased between protective covers. It is has its value if it is a documented record. People may own books that had priceless values, that they want to keep for future use. It could be any paper-based collections such as personal diaries, collection of cutting newspapers, magazines, periodicals and personal records.
Preservation means that an act to preserve, conserve and protect materials from damage. The protection includes the process of how to preserve it, manage it, and store it so that it can be kept lifelong.
This blog is meant to be viewed for mostly educational groups such as students, art teachers, and libraries. The process of learning how to bind, is hopefully will become part of the learning process as librarians will learn how to preserve the magazines, books or even newspapers. It is also hope to be a topic of the art subject so that it can be a hands-on learning method. However, those who are interested in preserving their precious books or records can always follow the process of binding.
The interest of displaying ways of the processing the binding, is actually to increase the awareness of the youngsters the importance of keeping and maintaining the valuable "things". They are the one who will lead the future generation, so it is vital to let them expose and understand the important of preserving things that are invaluable to the next generation. We may start of by teaching them to bind, no matter whether there are books or magazines, they will learn to appreciate and value what they have. Having this in the blog also may raise the awareness of the youngsters the importance of NAM in preserving the national records of documents.
According to Pn Morni Harun as Head of Conservation and Reprography Section (PRG) of National Archives of Malaysia, there are three types of binding process done at NAM. There are library binding, conservation binding and fine binding. Special techniques are used to bind documents, it depends on types of materials to be preserved. Asking her of what kind of binding suitable to be done at home or school, she answered either the library or conservation binding. Details of the binding can be read the process page.
Pn Morni stated that if more people are learning the "binding", it actually means that they are dealing with conservation job and with this they are actually appreciate the value of books and indirectly can manage and maintain books for future use. This activity may hopefully lead Malaysia citizens to become a conservation community, but of course it will take some time and need the commitment of not only the NAM but also the various government bodies and NGOs.
