Be careful what you wish for

Normally these blog entries aren’t going to be related.  But if you haven’t yet read yesterday’s entry, you might want to do so.  Even if only to explain the title of this posting.

• Thursday, 9:45 am: 6 tons of records arrive, a new collection
• Thursday, 10:00 am: 45 2nd graders arrive, for a tour/class session (note: this was planned)
• Thursday, 10:15 am: faulty valve on the 4th floor of library sends water into corner of A&SC stacks from above

The kids were great! and a lot of fun, but we really could have done without the flood and the shipment happening semi-simultaneously.  Remember yesterday’s comment about how every day is something new? Well, today was a chance to multi-task and to be thankful for how helpful all our colleagues in the library were as they came to our rescue and helped us minimize the water damage.  And we do mean minimize: our shelving protected most of the boxes, the boxes that did get wet soaked up most of the water so the contents weren’t affected, and only a few exhibit prints got damp and those are all duplicates, not originals.  Our colleagues had all of the boxes moved into another room and the wet materials spread out to dry and everything else reboxed and relabeled.  Within 2 hours.  And they even dried off the shelves for us!  Truly above and beyond.

We were hoping to really concentrate on the class visit in today’s blog, but we’ll let some photos do the talking about our day.