dave lacrone : blog

I'll always have a soft spot for the library system at University of Iowa. Back in 1999, I was a listless 26 year old, desperately trying to make my way in Iowa City, fresh off an unproductive (and occasionally self-destructive) four years in Chicago.

Iowa was a fresh start for me in many ways, but the most important thing it gave me was professional direction. The Circulation staff at Iowa Libraries hired me away from a clerk position at the Hospital cafeteria, where I was succeeding but not happy. My stint in Cirulation, Reserve and Interlibrary Loan was my first foray into Library Land, and the first time I had ever enjoyed work.

Thanks to this experience I received a very firm grounding in academic libraries and circulation procedures which continues to inform my work to this day. Eventually, I realized that I needed a Library degree in order to effect change and think about things on a higher level and eventually I got it.

Well, needless to say the news that Iowa City is experiencing flooding has been pretty troubling to me. Part of the reason, apart from simple human empathy, is that I know the Main Library, and it is vulnerable.

Check out the evacuation timeline which is posted on the library's website

Part of this mini-narrative is inspiring. The fact that so many people helped out, the train of people passing books around corners and up stairs, the spirit of cooperation that people demonstrate in times of crisis.

But I hope the Library learns something as well. When I left Iowa in 2003, the storage area was in the basement, apparently that is still the case. This area contained a lot of back issues of journals from all the branches (mostly engineering), underused books, hard copies of old theses, old dewey books, huge music scores, and duplicate copies of books in the main collection. Many of these items were of dubious value, but many were not. We had a Library Assistant whose entire job was to maintain the storage area, fill requests, and communicate with the originating libraries. Multiple books from storage were requested each day. Storage was probably more heavily used than some active open stacks collections in the system.

Preservation and book repair was also located in the basement. I won't begin to point out the obvious irony of that, except to say that preservation is a program, not a series of individual tasks. Preservation involves the entire way your library is structured physically, as well as the programs in place for dealing with potential disaster. It sounds like the latter was very well thought-out, given the efficiency of the book relocation.

The timeline also describes the process of moving special collections materials to the fifth floor study room. Special Collection materials in the basement. Sigh.

The basement is also home to the CIC film collection and an esoteric, uncataloged and moldy group of training films, shorts and other weirdness.

As tempting as it may be to blame library staff and administration for the situation, it is just too easy. Librarians aren't dumb. Most of us took a lot of the same classes, have heard the same horror stories. The Libraries were trying to get an offsite storage facility five or six years ago. I don't know what ever became of that. The building in general was very tight on space. A really active and creative bookstacks team majorly shifted entire floors while I worked there to compensate.

And most importantly, Librarians didn't decide to put the building on a flood plain. In fairness, much of the campus is in jeopardy from the simple fact that the University is bisected by a river. But libraries are the institutional memory of a campus. Research libraries contain items that are rare, important and irreplaceable.

Let's hope that the basement makes it through OK. To be honest I'm still in the process of figuring out the current status of the library in all of this. I know that it is currently evacuated and most of the valuable materials have been relocated. But I'll wager there is plenty left down there.

In the meantime, check out a video of the book-train at UI Main Library.