January 10, 2008
Keeping library materials safe in case of emergency: A job for The Disaster Guy
If another Katrina comes roaring into an American city, Gary Menges may be called upon to provide assistance. But it’s books and other cultural artifacts, not people, that he’ll be trying to save. Menges is a member of the American Institute for Conservation’s Collections Emergency Response Team, one of 60 people throughout the country who have been specially trained to respond to emergencies at institutions such as libraries, museums and archives.
It’s a role that Menges, who is the preservation administrator for UW Libraries, has been playing on a smaller scale on campus. He’s the one who gets the call when there’s damage to the libraries’ collections, and he’s the one in charge of planning to try to prevent major problems. As he puts it, “I’m the disaster guy.”
The UW has fortunately escaped disasters on the scale of Katrina, but the University did have to respond to two crises in 2001 — an arson fire that damaged many books at the Center for Urban Horticulture Library and the Nisqually earthquake that caused some damage to the stacks at the Engineering and Fisheries-Oceanography libraries and to books in other libraries.
Menges was deeply involved in both — helping to lead the salvage operations for charred and water- and smoke-damaged books after the fire and working with facilities to get the collapsed stacks stabilized after the earthquake.
But he says libraries and other cultural institutions face threats that are far more mundane and also more common — threats such as leaky roofs and pipes, cranky heating and cooling systems and inadequate storage. And with the advent of electronic files, there is the new threat of having materials on outdated systems that can no longer be accessed.
It was those more mundane problems that were the focus of a report two years ago by Heritage Preservation, a nonprofit organization that surveyed nearly 3,400 archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, scientific research collections and archaeological repositories.
The results were shocking. The survey found, for example, that 26 percent of collecting institutions (40 percent of libraries) had no environmental controls to protect their collections from the damaging effects of temperature, humidity and light, and that more than half of them had had their collections damaged by light or moisture. Fifty-nine percent of collecting institutions had the majority of their collections stored in areas too small to accommodate them and 65 percent had experienced damage because of improper storage. Most disturbing, perhaps, was the fact that 80 percent of collecting institutions did not have an emergency plan that included collections, with staff trained to carry it out.
The UW was not one of the deficient institutions in the survey, Menges said. “The larger institutions tend to have disaster plans or preservation services. It’s the smaller ones that simply don’t have the resources.”
Seeing the need, Menges and his colleagues at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, the University of Hawaii, Portland State University, and the University of Utah obtained a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to provide some preservation services for the western states.
“In most parts of the U.S., outside the West, there are conservation centers that provide preservation services — places like the Northeast Documents Conservation Center in Andover, Mass, which is the oldest one,” Menges said. “But we’ve never had anything like that in the West.”
The librarians’ answer was an informal network rather than a physical place. They call that network the Western States and Territories Preservation Assistance Service, or WESTPAS. It serves 11 western states and three U.S. territories, and its first project has been to offer workshops in preparing a disaster plan. Participants come for one day of training and leave with some assignments to start their disaster plan. They return for a second day several weeks later, bringing with them the preliminary plans they’ve written. Workshops have been held in eight locations, including Seattle.
One of the WESTPAS leaders, the University of Hawaii, learned the importance of a disaster plan when a 2004 flash flood sent a seven-foot foot wall of water and mud crashing into its library’s map collection. Although many maps were destroyed, its rarest pieces — listed as top priority in the disaster plan — were saved.
Still, Menges said, institutions don’t always have the resources to do what they know they should. After the Nisqually earthquake, for example, he found that all of the library stacks that collapsed were bolted rather than welded. The bolted stacks are the older ones in the system, and although the University replaced the ones that collapsed, a proposal to replace the remaining ones systemwide at a cost of about $2 million has not so far been funded.
The UW Libraries does its best to make sure all its staff members know what to do when there are problems by printing the library collections disaster procedures on posters mounted throughout the various libraries. The posters spell out who is to be notified in a crisis, in what order. Staff in the libraries also run through a checklist every two years in an effort to head off potential problems before they cause damage.
“Luckily, the UW is very well maintained,” Menges said. “I credit our facilities people for taking good care of our buildings.”
But the essence of the disaster business is that anything could happen, anytime, and Menges wants to make sure we’re prepared. “The collections in places like the libraries, the Henry and the Burke are our cultural heritage,” he said. “They’re our institutional memory, and I think we’d be poorer if we lost them.”
