Library Archival Materials In Recovery, Some Lost During To Flooding From Ice Storm

While Reed campus was closed due to what other Quest articles have deemed “Snowmageddon,” flooding in the library basement ceiling damaged seventeen boxes of the college’s history archival items, dating primarily from the 1950s. The exact time the flooding occurred is unknown, but on Thursday, January 18, flooding was originally found in the office of a staff member on the first floor of the library. 

After being alerted of flooding elsewhere in the library the next day, Director of Special Collections and Archives Tracy Drake emailed her supervisor, College Librarian Dena M. Hutto, to get on-site staff to check in on the archives. The staff found, according to Drake, “bubbling” in the ceiling, and that “parts of the archives had gotten wet.” Only seventeen boxes were affected, as the flooding was in “a smaller corner” that was “pretty isolated to one area.” That same day, Drake notified Facilities, who “came in, covered everything in plastic, and then tried to recover as much as they could from there.” Drake then confirmed that on Friday, “[m]yself and my supervisor attempted to come in and isolate the materials in a conference/instruction room to prepare the documents to dry and then on Monday my staff and I start the next phase to individually dry each item.”

Library staff isolated the affected boxes to a separate part of the library to ensure that, if there was any mold growth, it wouldn’t be able to spread. “As of right now,” Drake confirmed, “we haven’t seen any mold growth, which is great for us, but we’re going to monitor that material that was wet over time to keep it isolated because mold spores can spread.” 

The documents themselves were mostly “about special programs that were during the 50s at Reed College,” says Drake, including, according to Digital Archive Specialist Jenna McRoberts, “memos or notes” between people involved with the 50th anniversary of the college in 1958. “It ran the gamut,” says Drake, who went on to mention how there were documents from the 60s, 70s, and some from the 1920s as well, “but it was all related to the college history and not a particular specific collection.”

When Drake and others from the Archives department were able to return to campus, the recovery process began. The manilla folders were “soaking wet” so each document had “to be dried individually, so that means we needed a lot of space,” says Drake. Unfortunately, she says, “once stuff is waterlogged, we can’t restore it back to its original [state],” but through setting up airflow, and separating documents into individual sheets, some documents were able to retain most of their readability. 

“There are some documents that obviously are waterlogged, they’re a little distorted and bloated,” said Drake, however in the carbon copies of some “the ink ran off and you can’t even read anything on it, so those materials we will have to get rid of.” In others, however, it is difficult to tell whether or not a document is beyond repair. “We’ve been making determinations,” Drake says, “based upon going through individual documents [...] on what can be salvaged and what can’t be.” However, the amount of documents that had to be thrown out has been quite low so far: Drake says that while “[i]t's hard to come up with an exact estimate of materials that were salvageable and which were not,” their team was “able to recover about 99 percent of the documents and only about 1percent [sic] had to be thrown out thus far.”

Because of the water, paper clips and staples also began to rust, and Archives staff had to manually take out the staples. Some documents were able to avoid this issue through the use of archival staples which are “acid-free, coated in plastic, and they’re better material for preservation,” says Drake.

The leak also damaged the basement’s HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems, which serve as a necessary part of the conservation of archival materials. “What’s important for us is getting it back to where we can control the temperature and humidity,” says Drake, “and we’re not there yet.” On Monday, February 19, the temperature in the archives was 71 degrees Fahrenheit. Ideally, the temperature stays between 65 and 68 degrees.

The archives are usually kept at this temperature due to materials like rare books, some of which are “quite old, and leather needs to be in a cooler temperature,” says Drake. Also, reel-to-reel tape, celluloid film, and old photographs in film negatives need to be kept in a cool temperature. “Everything has a time and a date, a timeline for its life expectancy,” explains Drake, “and through keeping it in the controlled environment, which is what we do as a profession in archives, we are actually slowing the aging process. But for right now, we're not slowing it.” They hope to be able to fix the HVAC system before temperatures begin to rise again, because, as McRoberts puts it, “it’ll advance the degradation of the film, the warmer it is.”

Facilities is currently, according to Drake, “working with a third party contractor to get the system back up and running.” The Quest attempted to reach out to Facilities but did not receive a response in time for publication. There are also a few dehumidifiers running throughout Archives in order to prevent moisture in the air, which also has the potential to damage more sensitive mediums and older materials.

Overall, Drake says that “I guess we fared better than it could have been [...] things could have always been a lot worse.” “The process is painstakingly slow,” she says, and the team is still working towards rehousing and drying the affected documents.