National Geographic: Preserving Periodicals

Good news, first of all: the reference section carpeting has been saved! After a week of intensive drying, complete with students complaining about the noise and a constant stream of bloody noses from the dryness, it looks like the carpet dried out without too much damage. The wooden shelves are probably permanently stained at the bottom, but they seem to still be solid, and I don't detect any mold or mildew. I'll have to keep an eye on it in the future, but for now, it's time to start the process of reshelving the section and hoping to get things returned to running normally as soon as possible.

While spending so much time in the reference section, I've also been looking at our National Geographic collection, which is pretty darn all-encompassing. We have an almost uninterrupted set of issues dating back to 1956, only a few years after the school itself was founded, and while they've obviously been faithfully kept for a lot of years, they're not seeing any use. The past nine months or so of issues are kept in the periodicals section but don't see much use, just like the rest of the magazine subscriptions, but the rest of the collection is kept in reference - weirdly enough, on the very tippy-top of the shelves, where nobody can reach them and the majority of the students probably never even register they're there.


Obviously, this is not good for them as part of the collection - not only is no one using them, they're being collected in such a way as to guarantee that no one uses them, in which case I don't know why on earth we even pay for the subscription. If these are valuable to the school and to students - and I think they are, which is why NatGeo is such a staple for so many libraries! - then we need to find a way to make them accessible and useful.

A second problem became apparent when I had to remove a lot of the issues during the flooding scare; the top of a bookshelf, untouched for years, is not a great place to preserve delicate periodical issues. For many of these magazines, the pages have become cracked or yellowed, the spines have warped, the glue's become brittle and likely to lose pages, and there's dust pretty much everywhere dust could be. Yikes! So not only is the current storage solution for these useless to the library, it's also destroying the issues, again making it pretty moot to have them.

So, we're looking at two separate but related issues: how to encourage use of this collection in the library, and how to preserve and display it so that it isn't further damaged or destroyed by everyday wear.

Ideas for encouraging use:
Obviously, the first thing we'd have to do is bring the issues down out of the sky and put them somewhere they could actually be accessed by students. Unfortunately, space is at a premium in this very small library, so where could they go? It's possible some room could be freed up by weeding other old materials, especially in the more dated parts of the reference section, but moving them to just normal shelving probably isn't good enough to encourage student interest in them.

Ideally, we'd want to put together a display showcase of some kind to show off the kinds of things that are in these issues and how students could use them, and possibly relate it to a contest or game that gave kids a reason to get involved. That's pretty complex, though, so it'll take some thought.

Ideas for preserving the issues:
This area has me a little more out of my depth, though. Clearly a covered shelf would help with the dust, and a more firm shelving solution would help keep the issues pressed flat and less likely to warp and crack.

Honestly, some of these are of an age where I would be considering a digitization solution, but the library already has a subscription to NatGeo's archive of previous issues online, so digital copies of the issues would likely be redundant. The actual artifacts themselves are therefore more important for preservation, so I may have to do some research for useful techniques to help aging glues and pages.

It's also possible that maybe the library might decide not to keep these older volumes, and set a cutoff time when they get donated or pulped. Something else to bring up to the principal to hear her thoughts.

For this one, I'm sending out an email to the librarian supervisor over at Mercy to see if they have any particular way they handle their NatGeo collection, or at least any tips on display possibilities.