(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) There is a darker side to processing any collection. One that archivists often try not to talk about. It’s dark, it’s dirty, and it doesn’t always make for good PR. But it’s almost always necessary. This week’s #WyattWalkerWednesday post is about that darker side. This week, I’m going to talk about…moldy material.

Moldy material comes in with a lot of collections. And even in collections where there isn’t any mold, it’s an archivist’s solemn duty to check the collection carefully. Mold is incredibly commonplace and can easily grow on almost any surface. Your first thought is probably moldy paper, but photographs, textiles (clothing and the like), posters, even some digital media storage formats (usually magnetic tape, so floppy disks) can house mold. And anything anybody has ever eaten something near or held in unclean hands can end up moldy. Because not every single human being on the planet is an archivist obsessed with the long-term preservation of every document or object they come in contact with, it’s a safe assumption that at least some of the material in any collection may have come in contact with food or otherwise been exposed to mold.

Mold also spreads incredibly easily. This means that, should an object with mold be moved into a storage space with other archival collections, it can contaminate and infect all the other material around it. This can destroy an entire archives, if left unchecked. Archivists are of course very vigilant about ensuring this never happens.

The Walker Collection is no exception to this constant fear of mold. Because some items in the collection date as far back as the 1950s, and since the items weren’t kept in archival conditions for their entire 60+ year lifespan, there’s a high fear of mold. Because of this, and because of the sheer size of the donation, the material was held offsite until we could check it for mold and bring it on-site for processing in chunks. This week, I spent about 3 hours in off-site storage with Lynda, the Head of Rare Books and Special Collections, sorting through previously unchecked material in the collection. It was hot, dusty, dirty work. But we were successful! Lynda and I managed to look through all the remaining material for contamination, and we brought back a car load of manuscript material to continue processing.

Manuscript materials checked for mold and cleared for immediate processing.

While there was some contaminated material found that has to be separated from the rest of the collection, this material is not immediately thrown away. Typically when an archivist finds moldy items, the material is put into a quarantine where it can be observed over time to help us see whether it is active or inactive. From there, an archives can take different remediation steps to hopefully salvage the material and reintroduce it to the collection. This can include freezing the material, cleaning it thoroughly, and maintaining specific environmental settings (relative humidity and temperature) to inhibit mold spore activation and growth. If the mold is found to be already inactive, many of these steps can be foregone and reintroduction to the main collection can occur.

Because it takes time to see if the mold is active or inactive, we won’t be able to tell for a little while what damage might have been done. Mold is also often mistaken for what’s called foxing, a natural process in paper that occurs as it ages, leaving brown dots, spots, and stains on the paper. This is neither contagious nor dangerous for the paper, and the mistaken identification goes both ways. That is to say, many of the materials Lynda and I quarantined for fear of mold may in fact just be foxed, meaning it can be added back into the collection almost immediately. Only time will tell.

So there you have it: the dark, dirty business including in the processing of any collection. With luck, we’ll be able to identify any active mold in the items we’ve quarantined by the end of summer and begin working towards cleaning and reintroducing them to the rest of the collection. In the meantime, there’s plenty of clean manuscript materials to process, so I’m sure I’ll be busy no matter what!

(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Happy #WyattWalkerWednesday! (Editor’s note: due to technical difficulties with the blog, this week’s post didn’t go up until Thursday. Our apologies on the delay.) This week, I’ve been continuing my work on processing the audio cassettes in the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection to prepare them for digitization with our vendor.

As I mentioned last week, we’ve begun to move forward with digitization of the audio cassettes (about 800 of them) as well as a small number of 8mm and 16mm films. We also recently found a reel-to-reel audio reel dated 1967, which will be digitized as well. This material was prioritized for digitization due to the average lifespan of magnetic tape media, generally considered to be 10-30 years. We are still hopeful that the earliest tapes from the 1960s and 1970s will still have enough audio integrity to be digitized, but obviously needed to move on this as quickly as possible.

Thanks to the hard work of our student workers who created the original inventory of audio cassettes, we were able to get several competitive quotes from various digitization vendors. In the end, we selected a well-known vendor who has worked with LYRASIS (the hosting company for ArchivesSpace), the Library of Congress, and other well known, high quality institutions. Several Boatwright Library staff have also worked with the vendor at previous jobs, so we have high confidence in their work.

Unfortunately, the inventory the student workers created was not in the order in which the cassette tapes were arranged. This means that, in order to have the audio cassettes packed and listed in the same order, both the inventory and the physical cassettes need to be rearranged into the same order. Since they will be digitized and the files named in the order that they are received, it makes things much easier moving forward with handling the digital files if they’re organized into a logical and consistent order. Because of this, my boss Lynda and I put our heads together to make sure we started this project out on the right foot with this cassette arrangement work.

Audio cassette tapes from the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection being arranged into chronological order.

After discussing our options, Lynda and I agreed that the following order makes the most sense. Because some of the cassette tapes appear to be commercially produced, we don’t hold the copyright and digitizing and making them available online would move the library into some murky waters. These were separated out from the other tapes in order to be addressed by the vendor more easily. The remaining recordings, according to their labels, appear to be primarily sermons Dr. Walker gave on Sundays. In fact, we seem to have a nearly full run of every single sermon he gave between 1984 and 2002. (My arrangement work isn’t yet finished, so I can’t say with certainty if we have them all or not just yet.) I am arranging the sermon tapes into chronological order, allowing them to be digitized and easily made available online in the most straightforward way. This will allow future listeners to follow Dr. Walker’s sermons through time, creating the easiest way to trace his development as a theologian and pastor.

Audio cassette tapes from the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection that were either commercially published, undated, or unlabeled.

However, not all cassette tapes are so easily arranged. There are quite a few that are labeled with the title of the sermon, but only a month and year. Others have no date at all. And some have no descriptive information at all, leaving us with no guess as to what it might contain or when it was recorded (although comparing the physical cassette to labeled and dated cassettes can give us an estimate on the when, at least to within a few years). These tapes were separated out as well, into one pile of labeled-but-undated and another pile of completely-unknown. The vendor will receive the sermons in chronological order, followed by labeled-but-undated, followed by complete-unknown, and finishing with those tapes that appear to contain copyright material. This allows us to more easily manage the digital files, meaning it’s much faster and easier work to get them available online to researchers – always a major focus on digitization projects in particular and processing work in general.

It’s important to note that audio cassettes are a lot like folders in a filing cabinet. While it makes sense to have labeled a folder and kept its intended contents within it, occasionally people reuse old folders for new material – meaning the label might not be accurate anymore. Cassette tapes are similar, although the tendency to record over might perhaps be a bit stronger: brand new cassettes cost a bit more than brand new folders, after all. This is why we’ll be sending the commercially recorded cassette tapes for digitization; you never know if they’ve been overwritten with something. And of course, the same goes for the chronologically ordered sermons. There’s nothing to say that they weren’t accidentally recorded over, like when a children’s program is stuck onto your favorite movie’s VHS (sorry, kids, you probably don’t understand that one!).

Work on arranging the cassette tapes, arranging the list to match, and packing the tapes is ongoing. I’ll of course keep you all updated on progress, so look for more posts in the future!

(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) As I hope I’ve expressed in previous posts, the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection is pretty large, and includes a wide array of different formats for material. All of this, of course, has to fit into the Rare Books and Special Collections spaces here in Boatwright Library, and, coupled with the other collections and 23,000 volumes of rare books the division holds, space has been getting a little tight. So, this #WyattWalkerWednesday, I’d like to talk a little about some renovations to the RBSC space in Boatwright happening to help us expand our storage space and improve our research and instructions areas as well!

Now, some of these renovations you might have already seen if you’ve been on campus. And we can’t credit the Walker collection as the only motivation behind them, as some of it happened even before the 2015 donation. Nonetheless, the work going on now has built upon what’s come before, so let’s start with those earlier projects.

First and foremost is the Rare Book Seminar Room. This is a new classroom that was put up a few years ago to help with instruction within our division, and it’s been very helpful. As I’ve mentioned before, Dr. Walker was adamant that his collection not be used just for research, but for instruction as well. Having this room has meant that as we process materials, we can use them to help teach students about Dr. Walker’s life and work.

At the same time as the Rare Book Seminar Room was put together, our Rare Book Room also got a makeover. This included a nice redesign of the space. The Rare Book Room’s open hours have been canceled this academic year as we prepared for the renovations, so you might not have had the chance to see it. We’ve also rearranged the room in preparation for some renovations occurring — including the installation of some new shelving along one wall — so it looks very new and exciting! The room is already a great place to conduct research, but the new addition will help with staging material for research appointments. We’ll be reopening the room this fall, and we’re always open by appointment.

The Rare Book Room collections being packed and moved into storage in preparation for the renovation.

The new shelves in the Rare Book Room are part of a larger renovation project that we’ve been prepping for since last semester, and which began officially over Spring Break in March. Throughout the beginning of the semester, I worked with some student workers to help pack up the entire contents of our Rare Book Room vault, where the main portion of our collections are held. All of this material was packed up and shifted into some storage rooms by Spring Break, at which point all the shelves and furniture in the vault were stripped out. This was to make room for a new set of compact shelving, which will all but fill the space. The new compact shelving will take our storage space in the vault from 1200 linear feet to 6000 linear feet! With as large a collection as the Walker collection is, you can understand why we might be excited about all that extra footage.

The Rare Book Room vault awaiting its new compact shelving after deep cleaning and paint touchups.

Overall, this will be helping to keep all of our collections in a more secure, environmentally controlled and stable environment, ensuring that our collections will last longer and that we will have faster access for researchers and instruction. This is just another way that we are showing our dedication to preserving Dr. Walker’s unique legacy while maintaining access for instruction use and research into his many, varied accomplishments.