When you think of archives, you may picture dusty boxes or dark closets filled with preserved documents or other media. You maybe don’t think of 90 miles of shelves in climate controlled and “radiation hardened” vaults!
However, that is exactly where the Library of Congress is storing its Audio/Visual collection in Culpeper, Virginia. The storage facility is actually a former nuclear bunker that was built during the Cold War to protect huge amounts of money as well as up to 500 Federal employees. This article from the blog Architect of the Capital details the original goal of the bunker structure, pictures and illustrations of the site, and also the end goal of the Library of Congress to eventually digitize their film and video collection.
Watch this video from the Library of Congress that describes the Packard Campus and the process that the digital files go through to record and preserve them at the facility (it includes robotics!):
I have got gardening on the brain, do you? It is exciting to see anything green push up through the dirt, even a weed! But soon enough, we know that for the sake of the garden, those weeds have to go. So goes it with our library collections too. As we remove the clutter, the truly good content can breathe, can shine through more brightly. This is the time of year when many of our readers are doing inventory and weeding collections, so this post seems timely. The key question always is….which books are weeds, and many a librarian are quite tortured by it! Deep down, I think librarians absolutely know something needs to be weeded, they just need absolution for discarding any book. In many cases, the act of discarding is painful, and fraught with indecision. Some people simply cannot do it!
If you have been reading our blog for some time, you have heard of Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, two light-hearted Michigan librarians best known for their Awful Library Books blog. They also offer Advice to Reluctant Weeders Here. You might want to also check out their Hurdles to Weeding.
Good to go, or do you need to go deeper? Other resources that may help include:
Question from the Field is a service CMLE offers to busy professionals who want to gather wisdom from colleagues in Central MN library or school media center settings. CMLE staff pose the question in a blog post, then collects answers using a Google form. After a designated time period, the responses are shared in a subsequent blog post.
An area media specialist asked:We are looking at combining our Middle School and High School Media Centers, grades 6-12. Are there other schools in the area who have done this? Your answers to four short questions will help this media specialist plan and/or better communicate with administrators about this proposed change. Thanks in advance for sharing tips, tricks, and best practices to further enhance school libraries. Your input is valued!
Image by JD Hancock. Retrieved from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons licensing.
Most libraries engage in a yearly (more or less) assessment of their collections; weed dated materials and identified additional, new items to purchase. However, not all libraries are treated equal when it comes to budget allocations for resources. So at some point a process is generally developed to identify what to purchased, and ultimately in which format (print or electronic.)
With the growing interest in electronic resources, a dialogue has began about the viability and perceived importance of sustaining a physical library. The Higher Education Network recently weighed in on this discussion, from an academic perspective, in an article stating that. “Academics will need both the physical and virtual library for years to come (June 2013). ” Click here to read the full article.
There is something alluring about hidden spaces. I am not sure if it is the mystery, sense of adventure, possible mischief or merely the idea of sneaking away somewhere-known only to a select few. For some, this adventure begins and/or ends with a book. Buzzfeed (April 2013) posted 31 Beautiful Hidden Rooms and Secret Passages, using books as the main attraction/distraction.
Just for Fun: This week take a peek between (or behind) the stacks-to find something unexpected.
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