Taking old school approach to old books

Narcissa Sun stands in front of the high book stacks at the Oak Street Library Facility at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. PHOTOS PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

Narcissa Sun is something of a throwback. She enjoys knitting and works in a library. And her job — mending old books at a major American university library — literally goes back in time.

The repair of old books has been a delicate issue for library systems that have thousands of aged masterpieces among their stacks. A librarian needs not only enough patience to take care of the fragile books, but the patience and passion to spend hours in the library day in and day out.

Sun works at the campus library system of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the largest public academic collections in the world. Among universities in North America, it has the second-largest collection of books, after Harvard University. The university has more than 20 departmental libraries and divisions holding more than 24 million titles, including more than 12 million print volumes.

Sun, 21, recently finished her third year at the university and has been working at the Oak Street Library Facility, one of the main libraries in the system, for the past year. A cinema studies major, Sun said it was a coincidence that she became a librarian.

“Last year, when I was considering a part-time job in my third year, the library happened to have an open position,” she told China Daily. “I was thinking, ‘Why can’t I just take a try?’ so I applied for the interview at the library.”

The interview was not easy, said Sun, as she had to take several “odd” quizzes, including recognizing the correct direction of white paper, testing her slicing ability with a knife, and making a box with paper.

Thanks to her knowledge of creating traditional Chinese paintings, Sun was able to handle sensitive, thin paper well, and she was accepted as a librarian to work with the general collections in the library.

At first, the tasks were difficult and complicated, but Sun said she had a caring supervisor who taught her how to use a scalpel and other tools to repair old hardcover books and fragile pages. Sometimes, a book that she had mended needed to be reworked at the supervisor’s request.