“A collection that was built over a century with the work of many librarians cannot be completely restored.” Linda K. Lewis - Collection Development, University Libraries
It was a quiet Sunday night near the end of the spring semester when fire broke out in the basement periodical section of Zimmerman Library. The fire quickly burned several shelves in the basement and smoke spread throughout the huge building, the largest library in the state. Students and staff got out quickly. No one was injured and a limited area of the basement was damaged. But the fire, which had a suspicious origin, had a lingering impact for those who work in the building.
One year after a fire that destroyed thousands of journals and books in the basement of Zimmerman Library, a third of the library’s employees still work out of other library spDavid Brookshire around campus. They won’t go back to Zimmerman until the end of the year when the library hopes to re-occupy the basement. As the one-year anniversary of the fire approached this year, library employees paused to look back.
On April 30, 2006, students were in the frenzy of finals. On the morning after the fire library employees scrambled to open virtual reference desks in the Student Union Building and to set up a paging system to bring requested books from the closed Zimmerman Library to students and faculty members.
Behind the scenes, each of the more than 4,000 requests resulted in a library worker, in hard hat, mask and gloves, searching with a flashlight to locate a particular book. Zimmerman had no electricity or air conditioning. Once found, the books were carefully cleaned and made available within 24-hours of the request, a point of pride for the library’s circulation section.
In the days after the fire, faculty, staff and student workers not yet able to re-enter Zimmerman, reinvented the library’s circulation system, checking in (at Parish Library) more than 25,000 books scheduled for return to Zimmerman. They begged or borrowed enough laptop computers to keep library systems running with very little disruption. “Ten years ago, before we had so much material on eReserves, we could not have handled the problem in time for graduation,” says Circulation Coordinator Dave Herzel.
Facing the Fire Damage
While most library employees focused on rigging a system to keep the books flowing to UNM students and faculty, Dan Barkley, manager of government collections, volunteered to go in to help begin cleanup. “The first thing when I walked in there, was just this whole pile of badly burned books stacked up next to the government information and reference desk and it just sucked the breath out of me. I’d never seen anything like it. It rendered me speechless, and you know me, I’m seldom speechless.”
He soon had a hardhat and respirator, and with a small group of library workers, spent weeks sorting through books, one by one deciding what could be saved and repaired, and what could not. For people who love books, it was heartbreaking.
Anne Schultz, a member of that early work group, wrote about the experience for a book library employees are putting together about the fire and its aftermath. “This may be the digital age, but the library as a place still matters, and so do the collections housed within. The library is a place of quiet refuge for the kids who are shy bookworms, and a place of exploration for adults of all ages seeking to learn, teach, and understand the world. It is a place that gives you a tangible connection to philosophers, scientists, and students from years past, when you can pull off the shelf a volume printed 10, 50, or a 100 years before your own birth.”
An Unexpected Adventure
University Libraries employees never imagined spending part of each day patrolling for fire, but that’s what they did -- for months. Because the fire damaged portions of the alarm system, a condition of reopening the building was to provide constant fire patrols during every hour the building was occupied. Library employees walked through the quarter million square foot building, sometimes in areas with poor air circulation, armed with an air horn to alert occupants, if needed. They laugh and joke now about the air horns and about the miles of stairs in patrolling the towers.
And they are writing about these experiences: in prose, photos, poetry and song. Library Specialist Deborah Cole is collecting and compiling information for the Fire/Watch book. She says it will all be in there - humor, anger, comedy, irony, pride, a mix of emotions, and hope along with an eagerness to get back to normal. The book will help capture library employees’ strongest feelings: loss, frustration, and pride.
Facing What Was Lost
Linda Lewis, Collection Development and Zimmerman Director Teresa Neely have the complex job of coordinating the efforts to replace and restore a collection of journals deeply affected by the fire, many of which were printed and bound 50 or 60 years ago. Some journal collections in the areas of History, Latin American Studies, Native American Studies, Hispanic Studies and African American Studies were completely lost. Collections of journals in geography, anthropology, archeology, religion, philosophy and cultural studies were damaged. Lewis and Neely know the collection will never be the same. Too much has changed since the journals were originally printed.
Some collections will be replaced in print version, some are available only electronically. Microfilm used to be an inexpensive alternative, but times change. It will cost more than $3,000 to replace the “Hispanic American Historical Review,” and more than $8,000 to replace “Revista de Historia de America.”
Questions abound. Do you replace journals that might have been important 50 years ago, but are seldom consulted by UNM students today? University Libraries Professor Sever Bordeianu, one librarian sorting through the damaged journals, thought about that as they discarded 21 volumes of the badly damaged “Bulletin of the International Peasant Union.”
“The volumes were big and heavy," Bordeianu explained. "No way could I pick up more than one or two in one hand. Here was a title that proletarian sweat had produced at great hardship, during great times of privations for the population, its only purpose being to propagate communist nonsense, and which our library had dutifully found, collected, and shelved, and which was probably being read for the first time and for the last time.”
Fran Wilkinson, associate dean at the time of the fire, was one of the first library employees called. Her immediate concern was that the library had been evacuated safely. Knowing everyone was safe, her thoughts shifted to how the library would restore services to students at this critical time before finals and to how to contact all employees who work in Zimmerman Library – about 80 percent of all University Libraries employees.
“We immediately activated the phone tree outlined in our emergency response plan. Supervisors were notified by phone in the wee hours of that night. The DRAT group, Disaster Recovery Assistance Team, were assembled at 8 a.m. at our Centennial Library that next morning to begin coordinating the recovery activities. All library employees contributed to those efforts. All were motivated by the need to provide services to UNM students, faculty and staff” recalled Wilkinson.
“Trying to maintain the flow of information to employees, upper administration, and to campus was a real challenge over the first few weeks. Many people were working 12-18 hour days dealing with problems as they arose.” added Wilkinson. “With one-third of library employees still displaced from their work areas and intense efforts to replace lost and damaged materials ongoing, we are reminded daily of the work that remains to restore full services in Zimmerman Library.
“We were all impacted by this event – personally and professionally. We have learned so much about ourselves and about the strengths of the library and the UNM community. Sometimes opportunities for growth are unanticipated, but I think we will all look back on this experience and feel a sense of accomplishment” said Wilkinson.
The remodeled basement of Zimmerman Library is expected to reopen for students in January 2008.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at May 1, 2007 05:00 PM