Recently we were offered a Bunch of Boxes, gently used, from another archival facility in town. They’d emptied them out and simply didn’t have the storage space to keep them on the off chance that they might need them again some day. So the archivists gave us a call and said: do you want?
And we said yes. These particular boxes run about $5 apiece new when ordered in bulk, which we usually don’t do, plus about half that for shipping. (Total cost savings? At least $4,000. That’s a serious chunk of A&SC’s yearly supplies budget. Okay, that’s basically A&SC’s yearly supplies budget). Problem is, nobody in A&SC drives a large vehicle suitable for hauling 500+ boxes plus we would have been moving boxes til midnight if we’d tried to do it ourselves. So we put out a call. And did we get the responses. Jodee Kawasaki, Brad Generous, Tatiana Vayner, and Mike Robinson all provided their vehicles and driving skills. They drove to the facility, loaded vehicles, brought them back and unloaded the vehicles. Then the next set of library employees took over: Tatiana kept with us, and Ellen Davis, Frank Grubbs, Asia Bauzon, Sharyl Kitchin, D’Arcy Hutchings, and Seong Seo packed up every available booktruck and handtruck and hauled the boxes to the third floor Archives stacks area and loaded them onto a range of empty shelving. And it was all completed in about 2 & 1/2 hours flat. Including driving time.
It’s hard to say thank you enough. But we’ll start: thank you, thank you very much.