As master’s students at the School of Information at UT Austin, we share an interest in preserving cultural materials. In other ways, we represent the variety of interests found at the iSchool, from federal libraries to audio archives and everywhere in between. In any institution in which we find ourselves, we plan to be as prepared as possible for dealing with disasters that threaten the collections for which we care. We are each taking this course in hopes that it will get us a little bit closer to understanding, preventing, and recovering from various types of disasters that may occur.
The official course description from our syllabus (taught by Karen Pavelka): "The purpose of this course is to examine how and why disasters occur with emphasis on audio and electronic media. Previous experience with audio materials will enrich the experience, but is not required. There are no pre-requisites for this course. This course requires substantial participation from students including directing the research focus, designing experiments and adapting the course schedule. Much of the work is hands-on and students will need to handle fragile and dirty materials."
Why we are making this blog:
We have developed objectives and hope to share what we learn. We will be posting about our experiments over the next couple of months. We thought that a blog would be a great way to disseminate our results and discoveries as we progress through the course. We hope that our work will benefit you or your institution if you are recovering from a disaster.
What we are planning:
We began by creating a set of objectives incorporating what we hoped to learn from this experience. We have assembled materials and will arrange them to mimic collections that might be found in a small historic house museum. This week we visited two house museums (1 and 2) in the Austin area to get an idea of what kinds of collection materials and the potential structural and storage challenges that might be found in these smaller institutions. The site visits were rewarding and will help shape our work as we go on. We also learned many things about working in small institutions that may not have a direct impact on this project, but are likely to enrich our understanding.
What materials we have collected (so far):
- 10 computer hard drives
- 4-6 laptop hard drives (some may be damaged)
- 40 floppy disks
- 3 external old-school tape memory drives
- 1 hideous panel painting
- 1 laptop
- 2 phone chargers
- Some VHS tapes
- An envelope of photos (20-30)
- Shellac discs in paper sleeves and without sleeves (not cracked and cracked)
- Vinyl LPs and 45s with paper labels in sleeves and removed from outer sleeves
- Compact cassettes
- 8-track cassettes
- Celluloid cylinder (A couple)
- Several CDs
- Several CD-Rs
- Some microfilm
- Flash drives
- A small painting
- A large painting
- A framed woodcarving
- Cassettes
- Lots of books (hard cover and soft covers, variety of ages and sizes)
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for weekly installments of how our disasters and recoveries are working out. Please feel free to post comments and ask questions, We’ll do our best to answer.
