(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Happy #WyattWalkerWednesday, everyone! This week, I have a very exciting announcement: the Rare Book Room renovations I discussed a month or so ago have been completed!
As I’ve mentioned in many previous posts here on Something Uncommon, the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection is…kind of enormous. And there is a lot of variety in the different formats of materials. We have foam board and posters, large photographs and hand drawn art, negatives and photographic slides, metal keys and glass awards, paper and onion skin and floppy disks and vinyl records and audio reels and cloth robes and VHS tapes and audio cassette tapes and and and… And the list just keeps going. It’s a lot of different items, in a lot of different formats, which complicates our storage and preservation. And since the Walker Collection is hardly the only collection the Rare Books and Special Collections houses and maintains, we have to keep a close eye on our storage space.
To that end, RBSC has been working for years to improve our spaces for storage, education, and research. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the Rare Book Room and the Rare Book Seminar Room are both products of this work. And, starting in March of this year, the Rare Book Room Vault – where the collections are housed in an environmentally stable, controlled access room – was upgraded. That work was completed last week. This expansion brings our in-vault storage from 1200 linear feet to 6000 linear feet, a massive improvement. This is mostly due to a shift from traditional shelving, i.e. static shelves lining the walls, to compact shelving. You can read the full details in the earlier blog post I linked to above.
Now that the renovation is complete, there’s a huge project that’s already underway: moving our collections into the updated space. And of course, this includes the Walker collection! However, the vault is primarily intended for processed collections, so the Walker material won’t be finding its way in for a little while yet. In the meantime, it has shifted into a larger processing space freed up by the renovation, allowing for more efficient processing and hopefully a shortened wait time for the collection to be opened to researchers.
As always, I’ll be posting updates on how all these different projects are progressing, including getting the collections into the vault, processing the Walker collection, and everything else going on with us. So keep an eye out for more blog posts!