University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: April 3, 2008

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer

Ron Gaczewski Jr. recalls rushing to work one Friday morning in August 2006 after hearing news that a major disaster had befallen the UB Law Library. An overnight storm surge had leaked through the roof of O’Brian Hall and left thousands of books, periodicals and research materials—including some rare and highly specialized items—severely damaged or destroyed.

Ron Gaczewski says the Center for Book Preservation’s ultimate mission is to protect the knowledge that books contain.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI

Gaczewski, preservation officer for the Center for Book Preservation in the UB Libraries, says the events that followed the flood, which was discovered by a single librarian who had come to work early to open the library, dramatically illustrate the ceaseless preservation efforts that usually take place behind the scenes in a few modest rooms in basement of Lockwood Library on the North Campus.

“The library support staff, the students—they were really, really wonderful, really on the ball,” says Gaczewski of the center’s response to the flood. “It was a lot work—very, very hectic—and people were just tireless and devoted. It’s a big job to take 4,500 pieces of material, make decisions about it, record it very quickly into a database and then package it all up and get it sent out in a couple hours time—and that’s just what we did.”

About 12 hours after an impromptu workforce was pulled together from the skeleton crew of librarians and students who staff the UB Libraries during the late summer, Gaczewski says each salvageable book was catalogued, boxed, shrink-wrapped onto pallets and loaded into freezer trucks bound for a special facility in Central New York. There, he says, the materials were freeze-dried in special vacuum chambers that sucked all the moisture from their pages over the course of several weeks.

“They look exactly like wet materials—they have a lot of rippling or cockling, and they’re misshapen—but they’re dry,” Gaczewski says of the rescued materials, noting that many others were not even shipped for restoration. “If the material is made from clay paper”—a sort of slick-and-glossy-style paper popular in expensive textbooks and reference books—“they block,” he adds, “meaning they basically turn into a solid block of paper and can’t be saved.”

In response to this disaster, as well as the fire that broke out in O’Brian Hall in March 2005 that left the books there covered in soot, Gaczewski says that the Center for Book Preservation recently developed a disaster preparedness response and recovery program. Previously, he says, the center’s response plan assigned various aspects of clean up to different individuals—an organizational structure that caused confusion if certain key players were absent. Under the new model, Gaczewski says, a team of seven—including representatives from both the North and South campuses—has been professionally trained to lead all aspects of disaster response as it pertains to the UB Libraries.

“We’re not overly concerned about stopping the water,” he says. “We’re not overly concerned about the structure—the building. What we’re concerned about is the materials that belong to the University Libraries and how we can remove them, stabilize them and do whatever we need to do to protect them—that’s the number-one goal.”

The new effort also has pinpointed various at-risk locations on the North and South campuses and stocked these sites with emergency-response materials, including vacuum cleaners, dehumidifiers, gloves, paper towels, boxes, extension cords, flashlights, caution tape—even hard hats.

“Fortunately, we haven’t had to respond to a large-scale disaster,” he says, “but I’m confident that we would be able to effectively manage it.”

But Gaczewski also points out that most of the center’s time is not spent protecting the collection from flood and fire so much as from an even more relentless force—simple wear and tear caused by frequent use and the passage of time.

Since 1982, he says, “hundreds of thousands” of books have passed through the Center for Book Preservation, where three staff members and six student assistants process about 75 percent of the UB Libraries’ incoming collection, assigning call numbers and re-enforcing certain new materials such as paperbacks, as well as pulling many old items from circulation for repair and restoration. These methods include rebinding, creating custom wrappers, enclosures and boxes—also known as clamshells—in which to store fragile materials, and even reformatting, a process in which each page of a brittle book is photocopied and then rebound using these new pages. A scan of each page is kept on file for future use, Gaczewski adds, but copyright laws require that the originals be destroyed.

While about 15,000 books are repaired in-house each year at the university, Gaczewski says the Center for Book Preservation also participates in larger-scale projects that take place in collaboration with members of the “Big 11,” a statewide consortium of major academic libraries that includes those at UB and at Binghamton, Cornell and Columbia universities, and the New York Public Library. Using funds from a recent joint grant, he says several thousand items from the George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection—an archive containing more than 25,000 volumes of detective stories, adventure stories and science fiction and fantasy books and magazines from the 1920s through the 1990s—will receive a special chemical “de-acidification” treatment in August.

“We’re choosing to send a lot of that material because it’s pulp—low-quality paperback material,” he explains, noting that pages made from acid-based material will literally turn to dust if left untreated over a long enough period of time.

Although the methods by which books are preserved at UB frequently surprise those who are unfamiliar with the process, which includes replacing spines, altering covers, removing title information to create room for call numbers and even cutting books apart and replacing each page with electronic reproductions, Gaczewski says the Center for Book Preservation never loses sight of its ultimate mission: to protect the knowledge that books contain, even if it means sacrificing parts of the original vessel.

“It’s not just the physical preservation,” he says, “it’s the preservation of content—of information. That’s ultimately what this department is about. Our goal is to preserve the content of the research collection so that it’s available for future generations.”