Help for the library

Hopefully, in the not-to-distant future, scenes like this one will no longer exist in the Reference Center.  We are extremely fortunate that a new volunteer, Joan, recently signed up to work with us and she is....  A LIBRARIAN!  Our collection of library books is finally getting properly catalogued and will be searchable online.  Since our collection is relatively small, we've decided to use LibraryThing, which is a site where libraries and book lovers alike can create their catalogues and exchange information about books in their collections.

Joan is making great progess and I'd expect that within a couple of months we'll have the entire library completed.  I think that this will be a great help to researchers and other art historians who make use of our valuable Reference Center resources.

Meltdown!

We had a mini crisis here a couple of weeks ago when our trusty "scientific" freezer decided that it wasn't going to work anymore.  By the time this was discovered, all of our frozen film negatives were no longer frozen.  So, all 100 or so boxes had to be removed and temporarily housed in the archives so that repairs to the freezer could take place.

The humidity detectors started showing high readings and we became EXTREMELY worried about condensation building up in the bags, then having to open every package, dry out the mat boards inside (via baking in the oven), then re-pack everything.  While this isn't an overly complicated process, it's very time consuming and would have taken a few people (mostly me) several days to complete.  Thankfully, after a visit from Mark McCormick-Goodhart, who literally "wrote the book" on the film freezing process, we were informed that the packages had not been compromised and could be placed back in the freezer without all of the aforementioned intervention. 

I'm happy to say that we've now put an alarm on the freezer to hopefully avoid another meltdown situation in the future. Yay!