The most valuable resource a cultural institution possesses is its collections. Brooklyn College’s collections, valued conservatively at $65,500,000, are undoubtedly its greatest capital asset.It was the value of the collections and the need to house them in a modern, environmentally sound facility that persuaded the State to fund the new Library. When the State Budget Office asked the College to demonstrate how a new building would save the State money, the Library produced a persuasive document that projected:
1) The life of the collections under existing circumstances (which were very poor), and
2) How much longer our books and manuscripts would survive, given the new and improved conditions a modern facility would offer.It was this document that tipped the scales in our favor: the State saw the wisdom of protecting its multi-million dollar investment in the Brooklyn College Library’s collections, and the Library Project was funded.
Our archival collections, as well as many of our print materials, are especially fragile, having endured:
A major mold outbreak in 1993
Years of alternating freezing in winter and calcining in summer, in LaGuardia Hall’s old core stacks By the time the collections resume their places in the new Library, they will also have weathered:
All the bumps and bruises associated with the move out of LaGuardia Hall, to LaGuardia Community College off-site storage, and back to the new Library Among the Library’s holdings are several rare and valuable collections. These include the materials of:
Sam Levenson (20th century American humorist)
William Alfred (alumnus, dramatist, and Harvard University professor)
Alan M. Dershowitz (alumnus, attorney, and legal scholar) Each of these has conservation needs.
An in-house conservator will be a major selling point, in terms of attracting new collections for the College Archives. There is scarcely a collection whose materials do not need some level of treatment, and an on-staff conservator can do much of this work far more economically than sending it out for commercial attention. (We could never afford to send all the materials needing treatment to an outside conservation center for repair: the cost would be prohibitive.) Furthermore, an in-house conservator saves the College the costs of insuring valuable materials for shipment, and the worry about their safety and security. The new Library has spacious and beautiful exhibit space in its Special Collections unit. However, most of our most valuable and interesting materials are not exhibit-worthy: 90% of them require preservation work, and many are too fragile to be cataloged, much less exhibited (they are unfit for general handling), until they are treated. Loose, missing, or severely torn bindings and pages are the norm. (When rare materials are uncataloged, neither members of the Brooklyn College community nor external scholars can search our online catalog and determine what we own. In truth, we have a “secret” selection of rare and out-of-print books that would make Brooklyn the envy of many universities.) Often valuable books in the general collections are discovered to be in advanced states of disrepair. They too must be repaired, if they are to continue to serve the needs of our faculty and students. Sending them for commercial treatment is not only costly, but removes them from use for much longer than does in-house treatment. For all these reasons, the College will find an on-site conservation specialist who can continue to protect its considerable investment in collections, very beneficial and cost-effective. This person will recognize the early signs of deterioration and act swiftly to treat them with appropriate remedies. He or she will discover problems before they are beyond redress and (as with mold, mildew, and mites) have begun to affect adjacent items. A full-time conservator can also train part-time workers in basic preservation and book binding techniques, thus increasing the impact of the position.
