Physical Processing Staff Design New Map Carrier

Physical Processing/Preservation has, since the purchase of the Minter Welder, been slowly perfecting the process of encapsulating single-sheet items for better preservation and display purposes. Most of these large items are posters from Special Collections (often World War I and II era publications) or Government Documents (typically maps). The items for encapsulation are almost always old and fragile, many of them are quite large, and so safely transporting them from fourth floor down to Physical Processing was a unique challenge for several months. Carrying them between a pair of staff members or staff and students tended to be uneven and often threatened the items’ physical integrity, simply due to differences in height and stride. They also could not be easily laid on a book truck because their size tended to make it likely that they would slip off, strike the elevator on either side, or otherwise escape a safe position. These close calls with the library’s rare resources were simply unacceptable, though there were none that were badly damaged.

Physical Processing staff went through several rounds of attempts to improve handling these items, and finally — after a lot of creative brainstorming among staff and students — a design for a carrier that would fit these items’ needs came about. We needed whatever carrier was designed to meet several criteria, namely that it would: remain stable on a book truck (thus preventing the issues with variable heights and speeds of workers), be wide enough to support the largest items safely, hold them stable at the sides and prevent excess length from causing a problem in any direction, clear all of the elevators and doors in the route, and easily fit on the lift from third to fourth floor. With the capable assistance of Al Messner, our design was built and is now in use.