Archivist to the Rescue!

As I've mentioned in previous posts, we're settling into our new apartment in Sedalia. Although the apartment buildings are relatively new, we've been coming across lots of little problems with the place, as any new tenant is wont to discover. One of these problems is the dining room corner appears to leak every time it rains, just a puddle on the floor by the air conditioning unit, and easily cleaned up with a towel. Now, we've had a ridiculously dry summer, and the farmers are all starting to suffer for it. Thank God that it's finally starting to rain and substantially at that! However, that means we're also discovering the extent of our puddle leakage.

Today the puddle, apparently with a mind of its own, decided to travel along the wall and get the other corner wet. Not that big of a deal, except I had a bag of Library Journal back issues, assorted knitting magazines, and bank statements sitting in that corner. Oh. No. Shouting "Save the LJ!!" and dashing toward the mess, I unpacked the bag and discovered that only the bank statements suffered water damage (and not all of them at that!). Thank goodness. Immediately springing into action, I set up my own little preservation lab. Although not professional by any means, I am quite proud of the creativity which this little lab involves. The not-so-sodden pages are currently drying courtesy of my Vornado- seriously one of the best fans ever. Other ridiculously-sodden-but-not-yet-ruined pages are drying in front of my other two A/C units in the living room and bedroom, which have longer vents and therefore better drying capabilities. Finally (the part about which I am most pleased), the rest of my pages are hanging up on hangers over my bathtub. I always knew there were good uses for those little hooks that hang off the plastic hangers!

Of course, true to Information Professional form, I attempted to keep all the papers in some sort of organizational form. And as I was hanging these papers up, I decided our household needed to come up with a disaster response plan for our own information media. Nerd, party of me. Perhaps it is time to go paperless. [Cue post about ERM... but maybe at a later date.]