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A Library Recovery of Historic Scale
The Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University has begun a landmark undertaking called the Tulane Libraries Recovery Center, a program likely to handle more than 300,000 items from restoration, donations, and initial replacement purchases planned as a means to rebuild collections damaged or lost to Hurricane Katrina. These were principal research collections in the Louisiana | Gulf Coast region and relied upon by a host of users. The Recovery Center is based at newly leased space adjacent to Tulane’s off site library storage facility at 900 S. Jefferson Davis Parkway, about two miles from university’s uptown campus.
The Recovery Center directly addresses the 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 are beginning 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 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).
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 soon after the storm. Library Associates, a California-based company, is the contractor the library selected for its Recovery Center processing and cataloging operations through a competitive bidding process last spring.
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 microfilm (18,000 reels), 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 being restored are being shipped to a separate bindery company for rebinding and then returned to in Ft. Worth for quality control review. All restored materials eventually will be 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 the protected storage area and cataloging backlog, and 64,260 are archival works mostly comprised of political papers and other historical documents. Processing the music materials is 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 cataloging phase is expected to grow as the library adds replacement purchases to the scope of work.
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--should be back on the library’s shelves by the end of the summer. The other tasks of the Recover Center should take about 24 to 36 months overall.
In summary, 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 collections for the future.
