Tag Archives: drying books

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Mondays Are Hard Enough

You know the feeling when you get to work on a Monday intending to get stuff done because last week was one of those weeks? You get your tea, settle in, open your email…

library shelving under a ceiling leak
At least it was a slow drip.

So much for that morning to-do list…

books on a shelf with water dripping on them
Drip. Drip. Drip.

As disasters go we were lucky. This HVAC joint must have slow-dripped all weekend, or at least a portion of it. Some items were soaking wet, but most were damp or even dry.

Jovana sorting wet books
Jovana sorts the dry, damp, and very wet books.

We removed 157 books from the shelf for evaluation, 23 were wet or damp. We were able to set out 18 of these to air dry in the fume hood (remember the wiggle!). Five went into the freezer.

books drying in the fume hood
Books drying in the fume hood. A few went to the freezer.

The books in the fume hood were dry enough to put into the press on Tuesday. The items in the freezer will be monitored for the next few weeks. When they (and we) are ready to dry, we will get those done and back to the shelf.

Access and Delivery Services, Security and Facility Services, Stacks Maintenance and Retrieval, Duke Housekeeping, and Duke Facilities, all helped with this small water event. We appreciate having so many eyes and hands to help!

Disaster planning

Never, Ever Tempt Fate

Remember a couple weeks ago when I mused that we might stack two folding tables on top of each other to dry twice the amount of books in the same footprint? I can report that it works really well.

Photo Aug 16, 3 48 10 PMWe found some additional damp books  from the disaster we had a couple weeks ago. Since the tables were still set up I decided to test my hypothesis. It worked really well. As you can see below I made sure there were plenty of fans to circulate the air around the top layer. The books are drying nicely and we can still move around this small space with relative ease.

Photo Aug 16, 3 47 41 PMThat said, I’m going to keep quiet the next time I mutter, “I wonder if this would work in the next disaster?”

Disaster planning

Quick Pic: Double Decker Drying

File under, “Why didn’t I think of that before?”

Photo Aug 05, 9 15 56 AM
Pro-tip: Use folding tables stacked two-high for drying wet books with a more compact footprint.

This morning I stacked two of our folding tables on top of each other to allow the tops to dry before putting them away. It occurred to me we could have created this two-tiered drying table to dry the wet books we got this week. We could dry the same number of books using half the floor space. Alternatively, we can dry twice as many books on the same footprint if we had four tables, in two stacks of two. I need to remember this for next time. I think it would work as long as you were sure there was enough air flow around all the tables. Am I the last person to come up with this?