Many Returns from Hurricane Ike

I know that most of us in the geographic region of the country known as Chicagoland have little to complain about compared to those of you in Texas and other parts of the country that bore the brunt of Hurricane Ike's fury. But I did see in a weather map on Saturday evening that Ike had pushed bands of rain across the Midwest and even as far north and east as Buffalo, NY.

When I came into the library Monday morning, I was surprised to find that four boxes of books in my office had been soaked by a leak. I can't even blame this small-scale disaster on that venerable achilles-heel of libraries: our flat roof. Instead, we evidently had a strong enough west wind to push the heavy rain in around a window with cracked glazing. (Though our flat roof and clerestory also leaked as they usually do.) On the positive side, instead of being boxes of new books to be added to our collection, these were books that had been culled from donations to go toward our book sale.

At the moment, we're still drying out in the Chicago suburbs and laying on more sandbags while waiting for some of the area rivers to crest. I pray that other libraries damaged by Ike will recover quickly.

Invitation to a Book Burning: Disaster Recovery

This past Friday, I had the opportunity to attend a disaster recovery workshop put on by the University of Illinois Library Preservation Committee and the Illinois Fire Service Institute. At the workshop, we spent the first half of the day learning about planning for disaster recovery, and then we spent the second half of the day working hands-on with wet and burned books, learning how to assess them and properly prepare them for further recovery efforts.

It was an excellent workshop. You can see the pictures that I took along with some of what I learned by going to my Picasa web album. Thank you to the staff of the Preservation Committee and IFSI for making this workshop available!