Preservation Snapshot at the Chicago History Museum

We were prepared for the statewide closure, having met with our Director of IT and others to talk about what we would need to work from home. Unfortunately, the Museum doesn't have a VPN so I purchased two subscriptions to Splashtop so my two staff who catalog material could access their work PCs. For the rest of us, we relied on SharePoint, moving the most important folders from our department drive there. And, with two staff able to access their desktops remotely, we could ask them for any items we had neglected to move. The Museum was closed to staff except for Security.

The Director of IT was very helpful in setting up SharePoint sites for each department. Each department was on its own in selecting remote access and one of my staff members had trialed Splashtop and recommended it. It's a little challenging not having the remote access I'd previously had in a large academic library. My department worked to determine what documents we wanted in SharePoint. We have folders that are accessible to other departments and those that are just for our department.

It was challenging not to be permitted in the building as reference questions continued to pour in and we answered them as best we could with the caveat that the building was closed and staff were working from home. There were many questions we could have answered if we only had access to our material. Shortly into the stay at home order, a group of staff had weekly Reopen Readiness meetings to prepare for when we were allowed to reopen. The information about the REALM project was starting to come out so as we discussed reopening, we also discussed the quarantining of material.

We have a project team working on our Chicago Sun-Times acquisition. All staff had to work remotely. Unfortunately, the work of rehousing the negatives had to be postponed, but the staff transitioned to enhancing the metadata of the portion of the collection that had already been digitized so at least digital enhancement was accomplished. Staff in my department searched the Internet Archive and HathiTrust for full-text digital surrogates for material out of copyright.

There's no good time for any big project, but we have a big project that had to move forward, pandemic or no pandemic. We are renovating the East Basement collection storage where our archival materials, maps, and architectural materials are stored. To that end, once staff were permitted back in the building, we needed to start the preparation to move that material off-site. Sun-Times negatives and our most recent acquisition of Hedrich-Blessing photographs were moved off-site to Vanguard Archives, and Sun-Times project staff moved over to this project and additional staff were hired. So, there's a good-sized team inventorying and barcoding the archival boxes, meaning all that material gets inspected. Although the Museum has closed again due to Tier 3 mitigations [in November 2020], those staff are deemed essential and are permitted to work in the building so this project can move forward. Basically, all the material in the East Basement will be off-site for the entirety of 2021.

We reopened in mid-July with the Research Center open Tuesday through Friday. Initially we thought we could safely accommodate 8 researchers per day. By August, we scaled that back to 6 per day, by reservation only. Researchers, knowing the archival material would soon be unavailable, made lots of remote scanning requests, and my part-time staff member who handles those requests, scanned 1,889 pages from mid-July through October (we do not have November's figures yet). Staff were encouraged to work from home as much as possible, so in our public facing department of 7, we had 3 staff members on-site Tuesday and Thursday and the other 4 on-site Wednesday and Friday. Researchers who made reservations were told by automated email to let us know the material they wanted pulled in advance. Not everyone did that so we spent a fair amount of time emailing people to ask what they wanted as we could pull up to 5 items (archival boxes, published material, photograph boxes or folders) in advance to minimize in-person interactions. The REALM project results came out in stages. While we were comfortable with quarantining material for 72 hours, it was only a later study that advised against stacking material. So, we ended up using more tables than we had anticipated to spread out our quarantined items.

Now that the Museum has closed again under Tier 3 mitigations, the institution is more generously interpreting essential employees for access to the building. So, in addition to our East Basement project staff, my department (Research and Access) is permitted to be on-site. We'll be able to keep a fraction of the archival collection in our offices so we're prepping that space and our part-time staff member is wrapping up the last scanning requests she received. The four librarians (myself included) who alternated days on the reference desk are all more comfortable in our reference email account due to the responsibilities of contacting the researchers who would be visiting on "our days." Prior to the closure, there were just two of us in that account so the expanding of knowledge has been helpful. We've also identified projects that staff can do from home that enhances our collection (data cleaning, LibGuides, searching for digital surrogates).

Communication has been incredibly important. When we worked from home from mid-March to mid-July, I started off each morning with an email to my team and we continued with our weekly department meetings via Zoom. When we went back on-site, the staff member on the reference desk that day sent a wrap-up email to all at the end of the day, letting everyone else know what material was staying on hold, what researchers planned to come back, and how the day went. We had a few frustrations with researchers not doing enough social distancing and not wearing masks properly, so having each other to vent to was good for us.

My institution had been firmly "no working from home" before this started so it has definitely realized that staff can accomplish a great deal from home. One of my staff members and I put together a House History from Home workshop for Museum members that we presented in May. Although we've frequently done this as an in-person workshop with physical materials, we realized how many online resources there are for this research. This is one of the projects that enabled us to think more broadly about how we can assist researchers without access to our physical materials.

Primarily the REALM Project for quarantining guidelines.

Anne Craig, Senior Director of CARLI, has held bi-monthly Zoom meetings for CARLI directors. Not everything discussed is applicable to the Research Center as we don't have students or a circulating collection, but the discussions are always interesting.

One of my colleagues shared the article "It’s Time to Talk About Covid-19 and Surfaces Again." We had been obsessively spraying pencils and locks for our lockers, so this convinced us we could relax a little.

Also, Alice Schreyer, Vice President for Collections and Library Services at the Newberry has kept in touch with me as each of our institutions closed in March and then prepared for reopening. The Newberry Library is the institution most similar to us, so sharing what we each were doing has been helpful.

Library Twitter, CARLI emails