There was an incident this week in the ‘new’ Dovedale library store H located in the Otakaro Annex.  Water has leaked into the building in one room and damaged some of the collection that was sitting in boxes on the floor, waiting to be shelved.

I put my Disaster Response Coordinator hat on and sprung into action.  The dry material has now been moved to a safe space (we hope) and the wet material will unfortunately need to be discarded.  We have lost 1000 books that are far too water damaged to be saved.  There was considerable dampness and a lot of very nasty mould growing on almost all the items in the boxes that got wet. The call range of the material affected is PG to PQ which is mainly European languages and literature.

LAC team will create a detailed list of all the items that have been lost, so we can refer back to if needed and circulate to subject librarians. I scanned all the barcodes so we should end up with an accurate list.  The items already had a status of “temporarily unavailable” so they were not able to be requested.

Thanks to those that helped with this recovery task, and to those who still have work to do to complete the list of lost items.

Please feel free to contact me if you want any more information, but we won’t be able to tell you what has been lost until the list is completed.

Jenny Owens