AIC's 45th Annual Meeting

Between 2014 and 2016 the University of Notre Dame Libraries completed a National Endowment for the Humanities Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Planning Grant to improve and make more sustainable the preservation environment for the University's Rare Book and Special Collections (RBSC) storage area in the basement of Hesburgh Library. Working with an Environmental Team consisting of members from the Hesburgh Library's RBSC, Facilities, and Preservation Department Staffs, the campus Utilities Department, the Office of Sustainability, and the Facilities Design and Operations Department, as well as consultants from the Image Permanence Institute, the University was able to diagnose the cause of sub-optimal preservation conditions, as well as identify opportunities for improved preservation and reduced energy consumption. This talk will briefly describe how the team used documentation and environmental data analysis to better understand the air-handling system for the Rare Book and Special Collections department on the basement and first floors of the Library. In addition to the challenge of managing a preservation environment in the basement and an appropriate work/research environment on the first floor, the team discovered that, as the basement level had been renovated, additional spaces had been added to the RBSC air handler – without the knowledge of RBSC or Preservation. Speakers will describe the solutions implemented to alleviate initial preservation and energy concerns, as well as future plans to maintain a sustainable preservation environment for rare and special collections. Finally, equally as important as the preservation activities, the talk will discuss the difficulties and opportunities presented by working with an interdisciplinary team, from initial relationships and reactions, to the growth in communications and trust, to the present, where preservation advocacy is embraced by the entire team in their variety of roles. The success in building relationships has been so significant, that, to quote one team member – "Honestly, I don't recognize the context I'm working in as far as all of this goes.”  It is our hope that this case study will help to change the playing field – so to speak – for other institutions as it as for Notre Dame.