Climate antagonist in UA library story

Humidity control part of storage plan

Kelvin Summerville, a library support technician, pulls books from a shelf Tuesday at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s Library Storage Annex.
Kelvin Summerville, a library support technician, pulls books from a shelf Tuesday at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s Library Storage Annex.

FAYETTEVILLE -- For all the influence of digital technology on education, there remains a reason why printed materials won't be disappearing from academic libraries anytime soon, said Carolyn Henderson Allen, dean of University of Arkansas Libraries.

"We have not figured out how we can preserve what we're creating electronically very effectively," Allen said.

At UA and other academic research libraries that means the preservation of printed materials remains a day-to-day concern.

The challenge involves controlling temperature and humidity while also ensuring the availability of collections to students and researchers.

Mistakes -- as UA found out last year -- lead to irreparable damage.

Looking ahead, UA plans to spend about $11.4 million on a new high-density storage building a few blocks from the main campus. The controlled-environment facility will house published works, as well as some of the unique papers and items donated to the university as part of its special collections.

"You will find that all over the United States as well as worldwide, people are creating these massive storage facilities because we need to manage and maintain that history in some fashion," Allen said.

With a new space for books, UA also plans to make better use of its increasingly cramped main library, Allen said.

"The building is very often full to capacity, and I get comments from the students that they really do need more places to study," Allen said.

In 2005, UA completed its Library Storage Annex. The 13,500-square-foot facility on the edge of campus holds two bays of 15-foot-tall shelves.

These shelves are not intended for browsing. Most are tightly packed. A library staff member needing to access a specific book or perhaps a volume of an old academic journal can push a button, which causes the shelves to slowly part.

Often, a worker will need to stand on a portable lift to reach whatever it is that has been requested by a student or faculty member.

Temperature and humidity sensors stand guard over the holdings.

"The most important thing you can do for any collection is to create a good preserving environment," said Rebecca Elder, the founder and sole employee of Rebecca Elder Cultural Heritage Preservation, based in Austin, Texas.

"All of the reactions that cause paper materials to deteriorate are chemical reactions that are catalyzed by acids in the air, which are just all around us, and water molecules in the air," Elder said.

Humidity, along with temperature, should be kept stable, said Elder, now working on a project for UA to save several boxes of items that are in rough shape that were donated to the university.

UA has paid her about $3,100 so far for her work that involves using what's called a soot sponge to clean mold from paper.

Another common preservation technique is putting wet books in a freezer. The hope is that water molecules will go from liquid to solid to a gas without seeping into the paper.

"Conservators are scavengers. We love tools from all kinds of fields," Elder said.

She's among several consultants and outside experts who have been paid about $34,000 over the past 11 months to conserve and restore items in UA's special collections unit.

To preserve a collection, temperatures are lowered to slow down the rate of chemical reactions, Elder said. The cost of that is the main barrier for many libraries.

About a year ago, an employee -- thinking it would lower the humidity -- mistakenly turned on a humidifying unit near the back of the storage annex, Allen said.

"It created rain, basically," Allen said. "Once we discovered the issue, the unit was turned off, and we dealt with it."

An email from September listed the fallout: 46 academic journal volumes -- some dating back to the 1930s -- had to be trashed because of the damage. A photograph in a different email showed a stack of nine thick volumes with dark rot evident.

Allen said she did not know of any monetary value assigned to the loss. "It's not as devastating as it may seem," she said, noting that academic journals often can be found in an electronic database.

UA counts 2.4 million volumes in its holdings.

"All in all, it was not a devastating event, I'll put it that way," Allen said of the mistake.

Building space

In November, UA System trustees approved plans for a highly specialized storage building to be financed through general obligation bonds. A facilities fee paid by students and campus reserves will be used to pay off the project costs, according to UA.

The expense will create a structure capable of withstanding a tornado and that will go a long way toward resolving the university's storage needs for some time to come, Allen said.

Rather than 15-foot-tall shelves, the new library storage building will have shelving units that are up to 45 feet high and be able to store about 2.2 million items, according to material presented to UA System trustees.

But details such as the size of the building have yet to be determined, Allen said, adding that she hoped it could provide enough space for a decade or more of growth.

The structure is still being designed with help from the Boston architecture firm Perry Dean Rogers Partners, which also designed UA's Hillside Auditorium. It will be built south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, between Hill Avenue and Government Avenue, a few blocks from the Fayetteville campus. Staff members will travel frequently back and forth to provide requested materials to users.

Environmental controls are an important factor in the design, Allen said.

"It will be pretty much up to archival standards in terms of its ability to hold temperatures within a certain range," Allen said.

"The things that are going in that facility are the collections that don't circulate as often, as well as some of the manuscripts and archival materials in special collections, the artwork, the artifacts," Allen said.

An important benefit of it will be freeing up space in Mullins Library, the main campus library.

Lizanne Payne, a library collections planning consultant, wrote about high-density storage facilities nine years ago when she led the Washington Research Library Consortium, a nonprofit organization that supports university libraries in the Washington, D.C., area.

At the time, Payne concluded that such facilities had moved into the mainstream for academic libraries.

"There are many more of them now than there were then," Payne said, estimating that several dozen high-density library storage facilities exist today.

Limited campus space makes the facilities attractive to universities, Payne said, adding that high-density storage can be a cheaper alternative than expanding a library.

"You can store far more books in a much smaller building footprint," Payne said. "And if you try to build a facility to store 2 million volumes in a regular campus bookshelf space, it would probably cost you $50 [million] or $60 million, or more."

Allen said a study on expanding and renovating Mullins Library put the cost at more than $80 million.

Construction on the library storage structure is expected to start in December or January and last a little over a year, according to Mike Johnson, UA's associate vice chancellor for facilities.

Once it's built, the plan is to empty some books out of Mullins Library to provide more space for students, Allen said.

"We need about 3,000 seats in this facility," Allen said. Mullins Library is now about 1,200 seats short of that target capacity.

UA is committed to preserving its library materials, Allen said. "Research libraries are research libraries because of the historical material that we manage and keep."

Metro on 06/12/2016

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