An article in Monday's Guardian has prompted much discussion in book circles about the long-present "white gloves question." The piece stems from a new paper written by consultant Cathleen Baker and Randy Silverman, a preservation librarian at the University of Utah. In their paper, "Misperceptions about White Gloves" [PDF], Baker and Silverman argue that gloves often do more harm than good to paper materials by "blunting the sense of touch," and impairing sensory perception. They suggest that clean, dry hands are much better suited to handle books and manuscripts than fumbly gloved fingers.
In the Guardian, reporter Jackie Dent examines some differing white-glove use policies (yes at Trinity College in Dublin, no at the British Library). BL preservation coordinator Sarah Jane Jenner demonstrated the impact of gloves for Dent, having her try to turn brittled pages with white gloves on: "It is practically impossible to turn the pages properly, and I clumsily reach for large chunks at a time. Parts of brittle Paul's Epistles crumble; my hand slides all over the page. Gloveless, however, I can effortlessly turn the pages."
After reviewing the literature, Silverman and Baker conclude that widespread white-glove use only has come about within the last twenty years, "probably driven by the good intentions of some curators with ready access to archival supply catalogues in which vendors have increasingly represented glove-use as a standard component of library and archival practice."
There has been no defense of the white glove (at least none that I've seen) in the wake of these articles, and I think it's safe to say that its use for books and manuscripts is on the wane (for photographs, negatives, and some three-dimensional objects the question is still open and the jury still very much out). But, old (or even relatively new, in this case) habits die hard, and some in the field will likely continue to make use of gloves in the near-term ... even if they dare not say so publicly.
(h/t to Everett Wilkie for the link to Silverman's paper)
