What did we learn from this? Don’t do it again!

The title is a movie quote from “Burn after Reading” that I love because it fits everything.  In this case I’m referring to rewriting the Emergency Management plan using a wiki.  It seemed like such a great idea, but:

• Until I broke it down to a bunch of same page, it took way too long to load and then save an update.
• All the different font sizes we got because we were all cutting and pasting from other files drove us all nuts.  I didn’t want to take the time to make it pretty since we were just in the draft stage.
• I woke up in the middle of the night and thought –why didn’t I use Google Documents.  If only I had thought of that a month ago!

The wiki was good for bringing a lot of pieces of information together so we could share them.  But not for editing.  So, what did we learn from this?

Mummy- Last step

Of course I haven’t gotten to this yet.  I’m going to put all the documentation I have about the mummy in a plastic shelve on top of the box.

It is fun to imagine a whole new library staff 20 years from now, opening the box and saying, “What the [expletive of your choice]!! Did you know we had a mummy??”  But it doesn’t seem quite fair.

Boxing the mummy-step 6

It was now time to do the boxing.  There was some talk of boxing me instead. But I declined.

We had to carefully fit the top of the sarcophagus.

Lower her into the box.

I think Spike was jealous.

Boxing the Mummy-Step 5

Now we are in the Rare Book Room.  We put the corrugated plastic on the table to protect both the table and the sarcophagus.  As you would guess, Vince and I both took a lot of pictures.

We also used the plastic  to take measurements so we could add foam padding to the inside of the box to keep the sarcophagus from shifting inside the box.

Are we having fun, or what!

Boxing the Mummy-Step 4

Now, how to get her to the Rare Book Room where we will fit her into her box?

We used the top to the new box and stripped in on top of an old rolling card cart.

This is Vince Boisselle on the other end of the cart.

Boxing the mummy-step 3 [glass on - glass off]

She was in a glass display case and we had to lift the huge box of glass up and over her.   This was the part that worried us the most.  What if we dropped the glass on top of her.

Lifting the glass.

With the help of our construction friends with huge suction cups for moving glass, and our two tallest librarians (Joseph Chmura and Brian McDonald) it went very smoothly.

Abner Jackson Journal Blog

I had a question about use of the Abner Jackson Journal Blog from Kate Theimer (www.archivesnext.com), who is working on a book on Archives and Web 2.0.  My gut response was, it doesn’t get used.  Don’t trust my gut, I went in to wordpress.com to check and here are the stats for it’s 2.25 years on the web.

2006 averaged 99 hits/month (3 months)

2007 averaged 217/month

2008 averaged 310/month

Not too shabby.

Student workers are back, yay!

I’m always getting stuck when a worker walks in the door and says, what do you want me to do, just when my mind in deep into some other project.  I’ve put up a white board where I’m going to try listing jobs to be done when I think of them.  Then the worker can erase the job when it’s done.  We’ll see how it works.

They are all to good though, they’ve only been back 2 hours and almost have the list is gone.

Rethinking our archives

With a new library director we get the chance to look at everything we are doing with fresh eyes. Vince Boisselle has background in archives and special collections, so his fresh eyes are particularly helpful.

Since I came into the position with library no archives background I changed very little of the real organization. Everything in here is part of the Geneva Collection. That includes books dealing with the colleges and local history, mss files that could be pretty much anything, alumni files, program files, and faculty files (all of those cataloged as individual items and in folders in document boxes. On top of that are individual collections, like the Myler Half-Dime Novels, the Saga Corporation Archives…

Shall we move towards classing everything that is the historical record of the Colleges as a different collection? Start pulling individual items into artificial collections for ease of use? Some of them may have originally been collections that were separated of individual cataloging and classification.

It looks like we will put a greater emphasis on the rare book collection. I’m very excited about that, I’ve always wanted to learn more about what we have.

If all or any of you have any great insights to pass along. I’d love to hear them.

Boxing the mummy–steps 1&2

Here is the box that B&G built for us from hardboard plywood.

Here it is in the process of getting its corragated plastic lining.