Tulane Library Hails Recovery

Tulane University and vendor Library Associates Company (LAC) hosted an open house on April 16 to mark the first materials to be returned to the Howard Tilton Memorial Library shelves restored by the Tulane Libraries Recovery Center (TLRC)—a project team put in place to deal with collections damaged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The TLRC began working with Tulane's collections in February 2008.

In the flooding that followed Katrina, Tulane officials said the basement of the library—an area about the size of a football field that housed a music library and a large collection of government documents, newspapers, and microforms—was flooded by eight feet of water. In addition, Jones Hall, which houses the library's special collections, was deluged by four feet of water. At the 2005 Association of College and Research Libraries conference, Andy Corrigan, associate dean for library collections, described how, days after the flood, when only emergency personnel were allowed in the city, library officials also came back to begin assessing the damage, finding 700,000 of the library's three million books and 1.4 million pieces of microfiche in jeopardy.

In addition to lost collections, destroyed shelving, humidity, and stagnant air also posed major challenges. Texas-based firm Belfor was called in to stabilize the building environment to avoid mold and to pack up and freeze materials for salvage. Corrigan said 12,000 boxes of materials were expected to return to the library, including 210,000 books and 20,000 reels of microfilm, a “remarkable success” that poses continued challenges.

Some processed materials will be temporarily housed offsite, Corrigan said, since the library lost use of about 40,000 square feet of space. “The main library building is still on temporary life support in the form of a now aging temporary HVAC system,” he added, “but architects are working now on remediation and renovation plans.” While the campus “looks great” in general, “unfortunately, Tulane's library buildings suffered unusually severe damages.”

Tulane is not alone. On February 28, the university hosted an all-day Recovery Forum, giving representatives from ten academic libraries in the state the opportunity to describe the impacts of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “The stories presented at the forum varied widely in economies of scale, but they all documented remarkable resilience and great professionalism,” Corrigan reported, noting that, along with the effect on buildings and collections, the hurricanes “had profound impacts on staff and staffing, on budgets, and on the basic ways these libraries provide resources and services to students, to faculty, and, in some cases, to each other.”