Disaster Recovery Workshop Gallery

Images from the Tufts Libraries' Disaster Recovery Workshop with Gregor Trinkaus-Randall of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners.

Click on the images to see larger versions.

Hurricane Jen tries to destroy our books

It's hard work getting books really destroyed with a hose

The lid on the box of records does a pretty good job of protecting the materials inside from water. We had to open the box to soak the records. Gregor warned us that if the records do get soaked they can expand so much they will burst the box.

It was nowhere near as difficult to hose down a collection of Tufts Dailies left in an open milk crate.

Krista took great joy in destroying the books.

After all the fun of destruction we had to fix the books. Gregor taught us how to interleave sheets of blank newsprint in the text blocks to wick out the water.

As we interleaved blank newsprint in the text blocks to wick up the water we found damage we couldn't always mend. Here is an inscription from "Miguel".

After we interleaved paper in the books we stood them carefully in front of fans to dry. This volume is "Captain Cur and Wonderflea".

Since this was a demonstration we weren't always as careful as we should have been. A couple of times I draped fragile dust covers over tables and watched them fall to pieces.

I don't know what we would do if we couldn't recover this MS-DOS 5.5 3 1/2 inch diskette!

Flippancy aside, there are plenty of non-paper materials in any archives, library, or museum which have important content or archival value of their own, and knowing how to rescue them -- or how to stabilize them until the professionals get there! -- is important.

Luckily, Jeff and Krista are on the job.

As the books dry, their pages curl. Gregor taught us how to rehumidify curled materials with two garbage cans making a kind of double boiler of humidity. This is one of my favorite pictures from the set -- the high-resolution version is really beautiful.

As the materials dried, we replaced the newsprint with fresh and repositioned the books in front of the fans.

We never even tried to rescue all of the saturated Tufts Daily newspapers.