The month in review — on time!

First off, a couple of areas calling for congratulations:

SHO (Saskatchewan History Online) had it’s kickoff last week, with Craig Harkema and Joel Salt hosting two SHO-off, SHO-and-tell sessions. While they’re still tweaking a few things here and there (and will continue adding to the site and tweaking for the rest of their mortal lives), this is a truly impressive piece of work. Two particularly neat features are the “set making” tool, which works sort of like a pinterest board in that you can create a specialized collection of images, and the historypin map tool, which is a great way to explore regional histories in the province. To take a look at the site, visit : http://saskhistoryonline.ca/ 

Also our own Dee Gibson, who spent much of last year in residency in Iceland,  has recently had a show installed at the Mendel Art Gallery. The collaboration between Dee Gibson and Terry Billings is entitled Time and Water. The exhibit will last until June 7th, 2015, and the reception will be held on May 28th at 8 p.m.

In other news, I was given the opportunity to attend a workshop put on by the Saskatchewan Council for Archives and Archivists (SCAA) on flood/disaster planning and recovering. This workshop was conducted by veteran conservator Jane Dalley of Dalley-Froggart Heritage Conservation Services , and was crazy useful. We even had the opportunity to rescue some waterlogged photographs, posters, and documents. Jane gave us a number of useful forms and handouts, two of the most useful being this flowchart and accompanying table.

I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some of the things UASC is currently doing on the disaster preparedness front (aside from the lovely preparedness kit in the blue bin). In the last year we have had a greater number of fire extinguishers installed due to the highly flammable nature of much of our holdings, including some CO2 extinguishers, which are larger, clunkier, but less damaging to the documents.

We also purchased a freezer, which is useful in a number of situations.

Not only does a freezer help slow the decay of things like acetate-based film reels (as shown above–vinegar syndrome, anyone?), it can also be used in a situation where materials have gotten wet as a “buy time” measure before full restoration can occur. Ziplocking a wet book (getting the air out first) and popping it in the freezer keeps it in a safe state of stasis until proper drying can occur. Of course, our cute little freezer couldn’t manage a large-scale disaster!

Something that can happen to photos when they get wet and then dry improperly, or when they are stored incorrectly, is curling. The way to deal with this is to get them wet again! Or rather, moisten them until they become pliable, and then flatten them using blotting paper and weights or books, or whatever’s handy. Our moistening chamber (invented and constructed by Patrick) is shown below.

Excited to get an Archives and Special Collections specialized disaster plan put together!

The last bit of news is that, in honour of Trans* awareness week, I put together a little blurb featuring some Trans* children’s books from the Neil Richards Collection for Sexual and Gender Diversity. Check it out here!