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Record W4409476072 · doi:10.33137/cjal-rcbu.v11.43087

Pages of Poison

2025· article· en· W4409476072 on OpenAlex
Kim Bell, Robin Canham

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Academic Librarianship · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicCultural Heritage Materials Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In the 19th century, arsenic was a commonly used additive and colourant found in paper, clothing, household goods, personal products, and even confectionary items. Although most of these toxic products have long been removed from public consumption, books created using copper acetoarsenite, a green pigment, remain in our libraries and personal collections, with potential health implications. This article focuses on identifying 19th-century books in the Queen’s University Library, Kingston, suspected to contain copper acetoarsenite or emerald green. Based on visual identification, 150 books published between 1797 and 1900 were selected from the collections for X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy testing to detect the arsenical colourant. Results revealed that 28 books tested contained significant amounts of arsenic in their bookcloth, covering paper, surface decoration, endpapers, or fore-edges. These findings underscore the necessity to implement proper handling and storage protocols and conservation strategies to mitigate the risk of arsenic exposure to library staff, researchers, and patrons. Moreover, this research contributes to the broader understanding of arsenic’s impact on cultural heritage preservation, highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between librarians, conservators, archivists, historians, and scientists. By documenting and addressing arsenic contamination in library collections, institutions can safeguard the well-being of individuals interacting with these materials while preserving these cultural heritage items for the future.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.748
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.053
GPT teacher head0.231
Teacher spread0.178 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it