CLEVELAND \u2014\u00a0Chief of Collections for the Cleveland Public Library, John Skrtic, knows the Lakeshore Facility in Collinwood extremely well.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What You Need To Know<\/b><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of a labyrinth of books everywhere,\u201d Skrtic noted as he walked through the four-floor facility.\u00a0<\/p>\n For the past 35 years, the facility has housed roughly 650,000 books of the Cleveland Public Library\u2019s collection.<\/p>\n \u201cWe say about 14 miles,\u201d Skrtic said. \u201cSome of these books go back 100 years.\u201d<\/p>\n The space is kept at a chilly 60 degrees.\u00a0<\/p>\n Soon, all the books will be moved to a similar air-conditioned facility at the Downtown library as part of a project to move the collection to a more central location.\u00a0<\/p>\n Air conditioning is key to maintaining the books\u2019 condition.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn 2018 we had an air-conditioning malfunction,\u201d Skrtic explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Lakeshore facility went without AC for a weekend, and the humidity in the facility spiked.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMold feeds on organic compounds, that\u2019s what most books are,\u201d said Kate Passannante, a paper conservator for ICA Art Conservatory. She\u2019s providing consulting for the move, especially when it comes to some of the older and more delicate books.\u00a0<\/p>\n Passanante said mold outbreaks in libraries aren\u2019t uncommon.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMold can grow in a period of 48 hours,\u201d Passante said. \u201cIt really eats the parts of the books as sustenance.\u201d<\/p>\n Humidity is a driving factor.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have a risk around 60% relative humidity. When you reach 65%, that\u2019s when it really starts to grow.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s what happened in 2018 at Lakeshore when the inside reached a high 90% relative humidity, causing an estimated 5 to 7% of the books to grow mold. When the air conditioning returned, the mold stopped spreading.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHouseholds are really worried about toxic black mold, and that is not anything that we have here,\u201d Passanante explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n Since 2018, they\u2019ve cleaned the books if they were checked out from the collection.<\/p>\n Taking advantage of the move, they\u2019re now cleaning the entire collection before it is relocated downtown.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a dry cleaning process, where the surface areas of materials are cleaned using HEPA vacuums and soot sponges,\u201d explained Matt DeCirce, Program Manager for Polygon, the contractor working with the library to clean and transport the books.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cJust a small portion of the collection was affected, but we\u2019re taking the step of every single book being cleaned,\u201d Skrtic said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The cleaning of the books is a massive undertaking, but they\u2019re moving quickly with an average of roughly 10,000 books being cleaned and transported per day.\u00a0<\/p>\n After the books are cleaned, they are loaded onto mobile shelves and transferred to a truck for transport to a new downtown facility.<\/p>\n That facility is built to prevent another mold outbreak.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNow we have remote sensors, so if anything like that happens, or there are fluctuations in temperature control, we would know immediately,\u201d Skrtic said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The centralized downtown location will allow the public to have quicker and easier access to the collection, which includes rare and unique books.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one of the great collections in the country,\u201d Skrtic said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CLEVELAND \u2014\u00a0Chief of Collections for the Cleveland Public Library, John Skrtic, knows the Lakeshore Facility in Collinwood extremely…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":267845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[23598,7448,1022,13593,7366,139526,5281,171,50,1573,83406,52,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-267844","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-app-in-the-community","9":"tag-app-top-stories","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-cleveland","12":"tag-community-news","13":"tag-corey-oleary","14":"tag-ctv","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-ohio","18":"tag-ohio-what-you-need-to-know","19":"tag-top-stories","20":"tag-united-states","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115296129713799904","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
\n