shelf cleaning

[Barbara Lilley <blilley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Lorraine,

As part of the NEH funded Foundations of Western Civilzation Project at
Columbia University that I was project manager for (yes we actually
preserved western civ.!)  we did a stack cleaning project.  We contracted
out for this project.  We used one of the companies that specializes in moving libraries.
I can't remember the name, but Iam sure Janet would have it somewhere.  

The next step of this project was to do a complete inventory/condition
survey by call number of the entire western civ. collection.  For that
part of the project we used a different vendor (ProLibra in NJ).  We did
the training and I had staff who did trouble shooting. The vendor used
college students (we did this in the summer).  I would also highly
recommend using a contracter if this is a one time project.  The paperwork
tohire so many people at once was mind boggling.  It was much easier to
contract the work out.  However, as you know Columbia is a private
university while Indiana is public so you may face a different situation.

One unexpected product of the inventory was the number of books that were
misshelved.   Also the number of titles that were not on shelf and books
for which there was no shelf list card.  This caused more "clean-up" on
the project than we had anticipated.  We attributed this to the age of the
collection, and the fact that many people do not understand the dewey
decimal system.  Again, Indiana might not have these types of problems.  

We had once instance where one of the cleaning group cut their hand on a
razer blade that had been left in a book.  Thankfully they were not
seriously hurt and we had no other unpleasant suprises.  No bugs, no mold,
just lots of NYC soot.

  We also had to get the janitorial staff to clean up all of the
cornflakes and dust. We worked with them to coordinate their
cleaning schedule so they were not cleaning where we planned to be the
next day.  Since the lights in Butler are on timers we also had to get the
timers shut off for awhile.  I believe that did cost us money.

Based on this experience I don't think I would try to clean and survey at
the same time.  I would clean first and survey later.  

Good luck.  

Barbara Lilley