A Library Recovery of Historic Scale

The Howard-Tilton Memorial Library has begun a landmark undertaking called the Tulane Libraries Recovery Center, a program to handle hundreds of thousands of items from restoration, donations, and initial replacement purchases planned as a means to rebuild collections damaged or lost to Hurricane Katrina—principal research collections in the Louisiana | Gulf Coast region and relied upon by a host of users.

The Recovery Center is based at leased space adjacent to Tulane’s off site library storage facility at 900 S. Jefferson Davis Parkway, about two miles from the university’s uptown campus.  It directly addresses the exigent fact that each item restored or replaced needs processing similar to newly acquired items at a time when disaster-effected libraries are critically short on staff.   Thousands of boxes of restored materials have been returned to fill the Recovery Center’s large freshly renovated warehouse where more than a dozen technical staff, most of them recruited nationally, have gotten down to business.

Hurricane Katrina left the basement of the library's main Howard-Tilton building—an area larger than a football field—filled with more than eight feet of water. The basement housed a music library and very large collections of government documents, newspapers, and microforms. Jones Hall across the parking lot houses the library's Special Collections; its lowest level filled with about four feet of water. 

After the storm a major operation was quickly staged to drain these areas in order to salvage materials for restoration.  Then the library’s monumental collections recovery challenges unfolded, most of them in uncharted territory. Tulane plans to cover the salvage, restoration, temporary lease, and processing costs associated with its Recovery Center with assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).  Indeed, by meeting directly with FEMA early on, the library secured promised funding via 16 interconnected FEMA project work sheets that address many of the Recovery Center's major goals.  Reimbursement cycles established since have so far been working.

The restoration process has been handled by the disaster mitigation firm BELFOR at a technical facility in Ft. Worth, TX. BELFOR also conducted the initial salvage of these materials, which were selected by the library for restoration in September 2005 immediately after the storm.  Library Associates Companies (LAC), based in California, is the contractor that the library hired for its Recovery Center processing and cataloging operations through a competitive bidding process completed in spring 2007.

The largest and perhaps most critical phase of the Recovery Center’s overall task is the processing of restored materials.  This will also be the very important process through which the library will be able to make a final determination as to exactly which of the collected works formerly housed in its storm-affected areas were lost and which were saved.  This involves the physical handling of each item and two basic categories of work: (a) checking returned items against the library’s holdings to reactivate online catalog records while updating holdings information where needed and (b) basic sorting of restored uncataloged material such as manuscripts from Special Collections.

Overall, more than 700,000 of the library’s individual print volumes, archival folders, and recordings were under water for about three weeks, as were some 1.5 million individual pieces of microform such as microfilm reels or microfiche cards.  No recordings could be saved and only a relatively small amount of microfilm (18,000 reels) could be recovered from title categories selectively chosen.  But nearly all archival materials damaged were salvaged.  So too was about 70 percent of the music library’s printed books and scores, along with important older government documents and foreign language materials that had been waiting to be cataloged.

Many of the books restored were shipped to a separate bindery company for rebinding and then returned to in Ft. Worth for quality control review.  All restored materials were returned to the new Recovery Center site in boxes shipped on pallets, generally 32 boxes per pallet and some 400 pallets in all.  It is estimated that 111,975 of these returning items will need to be checked against the library’s holdings to reactivate their online catalog records and another 80,550 will need basic sorting.  It is also estimated that 77,145 returning items are government documents, 13,500 are music scores, 20,430 are music books or journal volumes, 16,290 are books from a "protected storage" area and cataloging backlog, and a low estimate of 64,000 are archival works mostly comprised of political papers and other historical documents.  Processing the restored music materials has been a critical first priority.

The processing of donations is a project phase of the Recovery Center that is more technically complex in that it requires the items handled to be cataloged, including some original cataloging for items such as music scores.  This will require a much higher level of expertise different from the processing of materials returning from restoration. The scale of the cataloging phase is expected to grow as the library adds replacement purchases to the scope of work.  But many important donations have been cataloged already; among the first was a collection of some 2,300 mostly new art and photography books given to the library by Edwin Blair, a local collector.  This was a much appreciated gift given the large number of similar art and photography titles that were effectively destroyed as a result of Katrina.  More than a hundred libraries and individuals across North America donated music books, scores and CDs-- some 20,000 titles in all.

Work began within the Recovery Center in February 2008.  In an important milestone, the first initial batch of restored music books was delivered to the library from the Recovery Center in a small ceremony on Friday, March 14, 2008.  Most of the library’s restored printed music books and scores--a top recovery priority--were back on the library’s shelves, on schedule, by the end of the summer.  The other tasks of the Recover Center should take about 24 to 36 months overall.

In summary, the Recovery Center is a grand innovation born of necessity and through it a great deal has been already accomplished under challenging and extraordinary circumstances.  This is the foundation for a mammoth recovery and rebuilding effort whose goal is to eventually produce stronger, larger, and more accessible Tulane library collections for the future.

Andy Corrigan
Associate Dean