Water emergency simulation training: not for the faint of preservation heart

I coordinated a “Collections Water Emergency Simulation” course last week for staff from nearly each of U.Va.’s 16 or so libraries. We could not have pulled this course off without the guidance of the fantastic Kara McClurken of SOLINET who provided the course instruction. I had never had the opportunity to go through a disaster simulation course before, and besides the occasional small scale disasters (100 books or less) in the various libraries at which I’ve worked, I lack the experience to teach a recovery simulation course for a medium (100-500 books) to large (500+ books) scale water emergency. The daylong course provided 35 participants the opportunity to review salvage issues, options, and procedures in the classroom in the morning and the thrill of getting hands-on experience doing salvage, evaluation, and recovery (not just air-drying and packing out for freezing or vacuum freeze drying, but also deciding if it was possible or more cost-effective to replace items rather than to recovery them) in the afternoon. See our photos!

I learned some valuable lessons. First, setting up this course — obtaining a tent and getting permission to set that tent up; moving several ranges of shelves from our stacks to an outdoor area; finding and then moving a 1,000 discarded books and other materials that you would find in library or archival collection (photos, maps, microfilm, archival documents, etc.); and then moving those heavy wet books to our recycling facility — was a tremendous task and took 100+ hours, I’d estimate.

Second, public relations and publicity for this course has to be considered well in advance. Note that the official title of this course was “Collections Water Emergency Simulation.” In our preservation lingo, you and I call this disaster recovery. The purpose of this shift in vocabulary was to distinguish the type of events that are truly disasters and imperil human life from the emergency events that affect inanimate things (as opposed to people). This new and improved title was guided by my library’s communication’s director, and I think it was a good idea.

We were very deliberate in the way we handled the fact that we had to destroy books in order to make this hands-on simulation possible. We posted signs around the tent to assure that the books used in the simulation were discards from the library and were withdrawn because of their poor condition or because they were low-value and uncirculated duplicates. I or one of my most excellent student assistants were on site at all times to answer questions of any curious or concerned on-lookers; we were at first worried that someone would try to “save” the books (which had to be out overnight and wet down several times the day before and day of). Rather, we found that folks were happy that we were providing this training to library staff and some even shook our hands with pride. We feel really good about the fact that we were able to recycle the wet books at the end of the simulation (U.Va. has a FANTASTIC recycling program).

The university’s news team caught wind this event and wanted to feature us in an article and video story. I love publicity for our growing preservation program, but I asked them to please focus on the hands-on recovery experience that was being offered to library staff … and not on the part where we hosed down and put mud on books. Essentially, I tried to convey how they could help us promote a good thing (the class the the valuable experience it offered library staff) and not amplifly the potentially inflamatory aspects. They did a great job covering the event, but unfortunately did not honor my request — a news story and video were released this morning. These were both promptly removed from the website as the news team had promised us a day to review the article for fact-checking and to make sure the article was on message. Unfortunately, that promise fell through, and before the story was removed several blogs picked up on the more scintillating side of the simulation and video of me merrily applying mud to books.

Was the course worth it? I’m trying to do the math in my head: a hundred plus hours of preparation divided by 35 very happy participants who now have superb training multiplied by today’s public relations crisis plus the humiliation of having to call several respected fellow bloggers to ask them to take down dead links to a poorly edited news story. Yes it was worth it. I just don’t know if I’ll do it again.

 

Way to go, Alpine AIC Angels!

I know that as soon as she has a chance to catch her breath, Beth will write all about the Angels Projects at the American Alpine Club in Golden, CO that took place last week after the 2008 AIC Annual Meeting in Denver. In the mean-time, MileHighNews.com has a great write-up of the project and the conservators who were so entralled in their volunteer work that they couldn’t put down their “painter’s pallet knife”-like microspatulas to grab a bite of lunch. I know the exact feeling, and wish I could’ve stayed in town and helped out!

I love this article because it not only gives conservation some great news exposure and better helps the public (aka, folks like my very own parents) to better understand the many facets of library, archives, and museum conservation activities, but it will also be a great prop for Beth to employ as she courts donors and grant agencies over the next few years to build a conservation program for the AAC. Preservation / conservation activities are always a “sexy sell” for fundraising (all those shiny tools, solvent submersions, and intricate hand skills). Add mountains, climbers, their ephemera, and heroic feats of sportsmanship, and a archival backlog of conservation need to the mix, and you have the recipe for conservation fundraising success.

 

New conserv-o-blog on the block sounds its barbaric yawp

I am a sucker for a rallying cry, and Jeff Peachey has a great one on his new blog: conservators of the world - both those pioneers in the jungle of private practice and those pushing out from the edges of “the system” in institutions - unite! I’ve always wanted to know more about the AIC Group CIPP (Conservators in Private Practice) and their vision for the future - I hope Jeff’s vision is a shared one amongst the group.

(And as for the Whitman reference, there was a great two hour American Experience documentary on PBS recently. I have somehow made it through life and a not just a few American Lit classes without Whitman. I am now on the hunt for an oversized, rare edition of “Leaves of Grass” missing from the shelf of Alderman Library.)

 

Nicholson Baker: Debunked on the road from preservation martyrdom

Nicholson Baker, champion of all those wonderful but yellowing newspapers that those wretched libraries were once thoughtlessly tossing away in a policy of “destroying to preserve” (read Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper if you’re not catching my sarcasm here), has surfaced again. No longer is he the investigative journalist ‘Siva-ing’ or bringing to light and public discussion the questionable enterprises of otherwise do-gooder libraries in the name of preservation, access, and stewardship. Rather, it seems he’s traded in the role of artifact martyr (”pillaging his own savings, Mr. Baker purchased some 6,000 volumes of bound newspapers from the British Library …”) for a new hat as poster boy for user damage of circulating library collections.

Mr. Baker is now a user of Post-it notes as bookmarks, a keeper of more than a Nissan Sentra’s backseat full of the University of New Hampshire’s books in his Maine barn (”piles of Churchill; of Herbert Hoover’s postpresidential papers; war records, biographies, letters, diaries),” a user of microfilmed and online newspapers (!!), and an exemplary culprit in the proper care and handling of library collections (he “fumbled and allowed Hoover and Brittain to squirt from his grasp”).

Oh yes — and about all those newspapers he’d saved from certain extinction: “’I went a little over the edge,’ Mr. Baker said recently about some of his newspaper-gathering efforts, and he added that being able to send his bound volumes to Duke was ‘a blessing.’”

Check out the full article from the NYT, but also breeze through the publicly viewable discussion on the PADG listserv. The author “Concerned in Bethesda” provided me with my first and best laugh of the day: “Leave the poor artifacts alone I say!”