[padg] Flooding in Iowa -- personal story continuation

["Kraft, Nancy E" <nancy-e-kraft@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Colleagues -- Thank you for your continued support and offers of assistance. We'll be sorting through all the emails over the next few days to determine what assistance we need next.

 

Since my email last Wednesday, I continued to provide the disaster recovery coordination, coming home every night exhausted. At some point I roped my librarian spouse into joining the efforts.

 

The staff at each site -- Czech/Slovak Museum & Library and the African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa -- were phenomenal. They kept their cool. They followed all the disaster response steps -- assess before going to work, divide into teams, assign a coordinator, keep the disaster recovery service in the loop, have the director deal with PR/insurance/board/volunteers, etc. They unflinchingly made tough decisions based on an in depth knowledge of their collections -- keep if possible because hard to replace or direct link to a collection (provenance), toss because they had several or easy to replace, stabilize and make a decision later. They took time out to talk to NPR and FEMA. Worked hard to keep their volunteers in food and drink.

 

Our response company, Steamatic out of Alsip (Chicago area), deserve high praise. Mark Cosgrove was unflapable -- well, except for once which you can pry out of me with a drink, I almost lost it over the same incident, too. His staff is well trained in collection recovery. They were polite and listened to my reiterations without complaints; careful with collections and very supportive.

 

Textile conservators from the Chicago Conservation Center came on site to clean textiles. Our wood conservator was onsite today to do initial assessment and provide drying out advice that has already been implemented.

 

Things that couldn't not be frozen or rescued on site are on their way to a University of Iowa storage site. Some materials have already been conserved by the State Historical Society of Iowa book and paper conservator, Jane Megger.

 

I stopped in at both sites today to take care of some last minute details before heading out to ALA tomorrow. I saw happy faces -- everyone pleased with what they had saved, that they had done what they needed to do, and could now take a step back before tackling the long recovery ahead.

 

Late this afternoon, I received word that we can now start getting into our University of Iowa Art and Music Libraries. The first thing that greeted us was about 7,000 slides under water. Mold will be a problem but has not yet invaded our collections. We're keeping our fingers crossed!

 

This is my last posting on "Flooding in Iowa" to PADG. I have posted some photos on flickr with minimum titles and editing. I'll be adding a few more over the next few days.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10805964@N06/ If you use any photos please credit me -- Nancy E Kraft -- so we know the source. If you need people/model permissions for publication, I can facilitate that.

 

We will be posting a slide show on our preservation dept site as soon as we can. http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/preservation/index.html

 

I will (hopefully!) have a slide show as a poster session at PADG. I was originally scheduled for another topic but since I can't get to my office I'll be substituting.

 

For those of you at ALA Annual, please be a little forgiving if Gary Frost and I aren't completely prepared to meet our responsibilities.

 

I'm very proud of my Midwest colleagues and how they performed,

 

Nancy E Kraft, Head

Preservation Dept

University of Iowa