Library News

A Library Recovery of Historic Scale

This fall the library is set to begin a landmark undertaking called the Recovery Center, a program needed to process nearly 300,000 items from restoration and donations 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 will be based at newly leased space adjacent to Tulane’s off site library storage facility. It will address 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.

Two years ago Hurricane Katrina left the basement of the library’s main Howard-Tilton building 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 basement level filled with about four feet of water, which damaged important political papers, political ephemera, and historic records from an influential New Orleans bank. A major operation was quickly staged to salvage and restore materials from these areas.

But the Recovery Center is needed to provide the staff necessary to manage and process materials recovered or replaced, since post-Katrina the library is handling its normal operations with a smaller number of staff overall.

With an insurance settlement over its collections losses still pending, the library is working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which has promised funds for the salvage, restoration, and processing of these materials, stipulating that this work be done by independent contractors as temporary services for the library. Securing these funds has been a complex process. The restoration process is being handled by the disaster mitigation firm BELFOR at a facility in Ft. Worth, TX. Library Associates, a California-based company, is the contractor the library selected for its Recovery Center processing operation through a competitive bidding process last spring.

The largest and perhaps most critical phase of the Recovery Center’s overall task will be 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 692,905 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.

Many of the books being restored are being shipped to a separate bindery company for rebinding and then returned to 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 will be a critical first priority.

The processing of donations is a project phase of the Recovery Center that is somewhat smaller in scale, but more technically complex in that it will require the items handled to be cataloged, very likely 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 hopes to add replacement purchases to the Center’s scope of work.