It's November and I'm finally getting around to chiming in on this topic.
Our facility has climate controls, but due to the nature of the building we cannot maintain anything close to what the standard is (ie Harvard's 50F/30% RH). That being said, we do store any and all objects -- realia, microform, books, paper, art, a/v, etc.
Katia (Penn)
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Katia Strieck
Director, Library Research Annex
University of Pennsylvania Libraries
267-275-5059
kstrieck@upenn.edu------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 23, 2023 10:03 AM
From: Cathy Martyniak
Subject: October monthly Library storage discussion topic
All,
Thanks for all of you who shared possible future discussion topics. Amy and I have started a list from your recent suggestions and will try to send one out once a month. And, of course, you are always free to send your own question to the list at any time.
Jill Friedmann from Northern Arizona University asks:
"What about a topic on shared storage for campus collections? Is this a thing? How do universities/libraries deal with climate/access issues if anthropology collections are stored with archival and circulating book collections?".
I can answer for the Library of Congress. We have two storage facilities that are intended mainly of paper based and photographic materials. We have very few objects (90 globes and a very small amount of art) We maintain the typical 50F/30% RH that are used by most Harvard style high density facilities. I have not worked in a museum setting so am not familiar with any different temperature and RH settings that they made use for objects such as anthropology collections.
I am looking forward to hearing back from any Libraries on this list serv that house both paper and objects in their facilities.
Jill, have you reached out to the museum community with this question at all?
Thanks,
Cathy