Re: [ARSCLIST] CD-ROM marking pens

["Bewley, Nigel" <Nigel.Bewley@xxxxx>]

Tom Fine wrote:
"How disaster-proof is the huge collection? And, do you have second
copies at a different site?"

This reply incorporates a distillation from my colleague Ian Macaskill,
who is the British Library Sound Archive's Storage Manager.

The British Library Sound Archive's product storage is split between two
sites in London - the main British Library building at St. Pancras and a
British Library warehouse building at Micawber Street. Second copies are
stored at a third site in the British Library's facility in Yorkshire).
At all three sites access to Sound Archive storage is heavily
restricted.

In the St. Pancras building everything is stored under good archival
conditions in a secure underground store with state-of-the-art
temperature and humidity control and fire precautions.

In Micawber Street the environmental control is not ideal, but our
occupation of that building is for a limited time with planning in place
for occupancy of the British Library's new Centre for Conservation in St
Pancras in January 2007. Most material in Micawber Street is shelved on
the top floor on shelves mounted on 110mm plinths to avoid potential
water damage. The only ground-floor shelving allocated to us at Micawber
Street is used for LPs, and this shelving is mounted on 180mm plinths.
There is climate control in Micawber Street but the building is blessed
with a good deal of 'climate inertia' and the conditions are reasonably
constant.

All Sound Archive material is shelved in simple numerical sequences, and
like shelved with like. Barcodes are mainly used as an aid to
data-inputting, and not for storage. (At the moment, all shelving and
retrieval work is still undertaken by human beings). To retrieve an item
from the stores it is only necessary to quote the shelf number. (As an
example, 1CD0010000 is a first-copy compact disc; the first-copy CDs are
all shelved together and this disc would be number 10000 in the 1CD
sequence.)

We feel that our collections are looked after to the highest practicable
standards, and these standards will improve when our Centre for
Conservation is completed.

http://www.bl.uk/news/2005/pressrelease20050721.html

Nigel Bewley
British Library Sound Archive

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