University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
NEWS LIBRARIES: PRESERVATION AND DISASTER CONTROL
By Richard Geiger, Library Director San Francisco Chronicle
Excerpted from News Media
Libraries: A Management Handbook,
Barbara Semonche, Editor.
Fire and Water | Structural Collapse | Off-Site Storage | Disaster Plan | Preservation |
Photographs, Videotapes, and Audiotapes |
Computer Technology | Bibliography |
Grand Forks Herald Flood Disaster:
Impact on its News Library
(1997)
Hurricane Alley:
News Librarians Weather the Storms (2004)
Disaster
Resources (examples)
Introduction
One never knows when disaster will strike. Many times a librarian has received a call late at night or arrived in the morning to find a library drenched by faulty sprinklers or plumbing. Several libraries have had to start all over again. The San Francisco Chronicle's earliest clippings date from 1906, since the great earthquake and fire destroyed its first library. What will you do when disaster strikes? Have you considered the possible catastrophes, the ways to avoid them or the best way to salvage or rebuild after a devastating loss? An important first step is the formulation of a disaster plan. Every news operation and every news library should have one. Disaster plans range from the very general to the very specific. This chapter will first discuss t he many perils a library may face and then list some basic principles to guide the news librarian in preparing for the unpredictable.
To provide some protection from both fire and water, you may want to make
special plans for materials of great value to your news operation: the
publisher's papers, for instance. Some cabinets have limited fire and water
resistance and may be used to pr otect materials in the case of a minor fire. If
valuable materials are not actively used, off-site storage by storage
specialists may be the ticket.
Although the process of putting out fires is a frequent cause of water
damage, it is not the only one. Broken pipes and floods have inundated many a
collection. Basement libraries or storage areas are at particular risk. Making
sure that nothing is store d directly on the floor is an important first step.
The most common method of handling wet books and papers is freeze-drying or
vacuum drying. There are companies in most areas that specialize in this
relatively common process. Some have specially outfitted trucks that can dry the
materials near your faci lity. Freezing wet materials, even in a local meat
locker, stops mold and gives you time to make difficult decisions on the
preservation of your library materials, the weeding or the destruction. A note
on microfilm: it should not be frozen but stored in cold water until
arrangements can be made with the manufacturer for drying and reprocessing. But
when you consider the problems of water-based glues, ink stains or photos stuck
together, it is better to figure out ways to avoid the whole catastrophe.
There are four basic areas that need to be addressed in a disaster situation,
assuming you want to broadcast or publish a newspaper: Different library materials are sensitive to these conditions in different
ways. Microfilm, which is very stable, may react to chemicals in paper with
which it comes into contact, while newspaper clippings are innately a
preservation time bomb. Since about 1860, most manufactured paper has contained
alum, which produces sulfuric acid when exposed to normal atmospheric moisture.
The acid then makes the paper brittle. Deacidification of a clipping collection
would be prohibitively expensive. Most libraries interested in preservation of
their clippings and in reducing their bulk as well, have turned to microfilming.
The advent of CD-ROM technology also holds promise for a high-resolution product
that can be retrieved and viewed from a computer terminal.
There are several approaches for the preservation of valuable, old,
deteriorating newspapers. A limited number of pages of a newspaper can be
preserved by deacidification procedures. The procedures involve deacidification
followed by either lamination or encapsulation. One home remedy involves
treating materials by soaking newspaper sheets in a solution made with milk of
magnesia and club soda. Another uses diethyl zinc gas. A third technique
involves soaking in two calcium solutions, drying in any acid- free environment
and then encapsulating or laminating in mylar. With lamination, a
"sandwich" is made with the document between two sheets each of mylar
and acid-free tissue paper. Heat (300 degrees) and pressure is applied for a
period of time to this "sandwich." Laminating a newspaper page may
take one week to process. The bonding is supposed to last more than 100 years
stored under archival conditions. Encapsulation is a process where a deacidified
document (or newspaper page) is placed between two she ets of mylar or other
similar chemically inert plastic and the edges are sealed with a heating
element. Before the last seal is made, air is removed from the
"pocket." Each page can be bound and prepared into a volume for
archival storage.
Without archival storage conditions, high temperatures can speed the
decomposition of materials and cause excessive drying and brittleness. High
humidity encourages mold growth, as does poor air circulation. Bright light
causes fading of colors and browning of paper and other materials. When Hurricane Hugo slammed into the South Carolina coast in 1989, one
historian's 43,000 feet of audiotape, which contained an oral history of a
southern black man, was covered with mud, sand and saltwater. Salvaging the
tapes seemed an impossible task. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
manuscript librarian Mike Casey and folklore student Patrick Sky developed a
painstaking process to clean and re-record the nearly eight miles of tape. The
cleaning device Casey and Sky engineered resembled a R ube Goldberg contraption.
Such unlikely components as coffee-maker filters papers, a hair dryer,
cheesecloth, cardboard boxes and distilled water were put into play. The two
gently unwound the tape by hand, reeled it through a bath filled with
cheesecloth for cleaning, passed it between sheets of coffee-maker filters for
blotting, and finally dried it by rolling it forward and backward through a long
cardboard tube heated by the hair dryer. After finding that their process
worked, the university's Southern Folklife Collection staff re-recorded the
interviews on professional-quality master tapes.
Casey and Sky turned to this homemade device because no prior directions to
restore audiotape existed. The National Archives in Washington, D.C. offered
some suggestions, but no proven methods. While unorthodox, the Casey-Sky method
worked. The tapes are now on deposit in the Southern Folklife Collection.
Disaster struck the National Public Radio (NPR) when a major water main broke
in Washington, D. C. in 1992. The library experienced first hand the trauma and
destruction that resulted when the basement storage area, which housed valuable
NPR archives, fl ooded. Hundreds of boxes of wet tapes had to be removed,
separated and dried. Archivists at the National Archives and audiotape
manufactures such as AMPEX offered some direction. NPR's procedure was similar
to Casey's and Sky's approach. The tapes were de moisturized, cleansed and dried
to remove silt, then "baked" to remove the more severely water-logged
tapes. The monotonous task of retyping documentation and matching them with the
restored tapes was still underway, nearly nine months after the flood. Th e
near-disaster raised the profile and contributions of the NPR library and
emphasized the critical importance of disaster prevention.
A somewhat dated, but still useful, bibliography on the conservation and
restoration of photographs was written by Mary Vance in 1983. Full citation of
this and other related works on the topic is offered in the bibliography at the
conclusion of this chapter. Password security for computers and files will keep the hacker from getting
into your system and causing problems. Security software allows for levels of
access that can control the authority of the user. There is also software that
will block the use of computers by unauthorized personnel.
Computer viruses are another major problem. These viruses are hidden computer
programs designed by hackers often as proof of their ability. It spreads from
computer to computer when a machine "boots up" from a floppy disk. The
results range from a mild, brief interruption to wholesale devastation of data.
Few organizations with growing numbers of microcomputers can afford to ignore
the spread of computer viruses and other contaminants. The news library cannot
operate independently of other departments regarding computer safety; the entire
organization mus t be committed to institute and follow safety measures.
Computer users who never copy software, data or games from other computers,
who never download files from electronic bulletin boards and who never lend
their floppy disks to a friend should be safe. A good rule is to avoid shareware
and unauthorized copies of software and use virus-checking software to check new
software. Consult with local computer vendors for anti-virus programs and how to
install them. Symantec, Microcom and McAfee Associates are among several vendors
offering reliable, reasonable cos t programs.
New viruses continue to infect and reinfect computers, so the best computer
disaster prevention advice is to minimize opportunities for contamination and
keep current with anti-viral protection.FIRE AND WATER
The most common disasters in libraries almost always involve water damage-often
in the course of fighting fire. Early warning and careful placement of
fire-fighting equipment constitute the first order of business. To a library,
water is a friend as well as a foe. While computer rooms have the luxury of
expensive Halon gas systems to fight fire, most libraries must make do with
water sprinkler systems placed in the ceiling. Sprinklers usually stop the total
loss by fire, but the resulting water causes a host of new problems.
STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE
Structural collapse caused by improper building engineering is fortunately a
relatively rare occurrence and, given qualified architects and engineers, should
not be of great concern. Floor loads must not exceed the designed strength of
the building, or t he floor must be rebuilt to handle a larger load. Structural
collapse caused by earthquakes, tornados and other natural disasters is beyond
our prediction and control. Again, these types of disasters are relatively rare.
OFF-SITE STORAGE
If there are ways to create duplicates of your collections to store off-site,
consider them carefully. Cost may be prohibitive in many cases. If you microfilm
your clipping collection, it is probably worth making a duplicate copy to store
in another loca tion. It might make sense to store your negatives in a separate
location from your photographs. With the advent of electronic libraries, storage
of the library database in off-site locations has become part of the routine.
The cost and size of backup tapes make the procedure relatively easy and
inexpensive. The arrival of electronic photography and storage should also make
off-site storage possible, although the tremendous cost of storing photographs
digitally will not make this an easy decision.
THE DISASTER PLAN
There are many books that are devoted to the formation and implementation of
disaster plans. In this section, some of the general principles will be
discussed. The disaster plan for a news operation is a bit different than for
your average business. A ne ws operation is more concerned with how to continue
the operation of the business in spite of all odds, since disasters are
something news people do not want to miss.
Some other disaster preparedness topics to consider are the following:
PRESERVATION
Although not as exciting as consideration of disasters and disaster planning,
basic preservation issues are ones we should all face. The basic conditions that
must be addressed for preservation of a library collection are humidity,
temperature, air circu lation, light and chemical composition.
PHOTOGRAPHS, VIDEOTAPES AND AUDIOTAPES
It would be unusual for the typical news librarian to have professional training
and experience to qualify for archival responsibility of visual and audio
collections. Nevertheless, managing the photo and graphic collections over a
period of time does ra ise questions about who and where to find expertise in
this area when the need emerges. Extensive discussion of preservation and
restoration techniques for photographs, videotapes and audiotapes is beyond the
scope of this chapter, but mention should be m ade of at least a few of the
approaches and resources currently available on these topics.
COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
Although computers and electronic data are also sensitive to the environmental
factors listed in the preceding section, the advent of computer technology in
news libraries has brought a whole new list of cautions to the forefront.
Probably the most impor tant rule is to back up your software and data on a
regular basis and store these backup disks or tapes off-site. Many people have
lost days, weeks or months of work by not having appropriate backup procedures.
Dan Woods, database editor for The News & Ob server, offers some excellent
advice about safe computing in news organizations. He describes some basic
backup, restore and replace procedures for PC users.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
This page was created by Barbara P. Semonche. It was last updated March 2004.