Preservation @ ZSR blog

On Thursday, Nov. 29th, eight history students in Dr. Jeff Lerner’s Roman History class stood in the library entrance and made their presentations. After working through the semester on the research, meeting with me on their exhibit design, and constructing their exhibit- each student was ready to present their work to the entire class of 28. All the exhibits were generally about Ancient Rome. Some students worked mostly on their own and needed little help or assistance. Most students, however, worked in Preservation and did most of the construction there using the library as a resource for books and other resources. It is a gratifying and worthwhile experience to work with these students and see their final products materialize. Images of the exhibits can be seen at the ZSR Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zsrlibrary/sets/72157600032772399/

On Wenesday, November 14, I taught a book repair workshop for the NCSLMA (North Carolina School Library Media Association. This workshop was sponsored by the North Carolina Preservation Consortium (NCPC). The workshop was a pre-conference offering for the NCSLMA Annual conference held at the Benton Convention Center in Winston-Salem. I had 22 media coordinators to teach repair techniques. The day flew by as I tried in vain to keep up with these teachers-no matter what I did, they always went ahead of where I was in the teaching process. Teachers are often on their own and have to solve problems with no outside help-so during this workshop, they just did what they thought most natural—-forge ahead! Meanwhile, I was trotting behind calling-”hey Wild Bill, wait for me!” We covered spine replacement, torn pages, tipping in pages, tightening hinges and many other things. It was a good day spent helping these media coordinators who don’t really have any resources for book repair in their home schools.

Joe Harrington and his quick thinking student Alex Chung alerted me to a water leak this week on Wilson 6. A heating duct was leaking on a section of a range in the HF’s. We quickly removed the books in harms way and placed a plastic trash can to catch the water. In all, about 50 titles were affected. We lost about 25 titles due to water saturation, but these titles are duplicated in our collection in several other formats. Those titles we recovered will be fan-dried and pressed in Preservation before being returned to the stacks. Thanks Joe and Alex!