Priaulx Library reopens after maintenance work
LIBRARIANS and volunteers at Priaulx Library have spent January sorting out more than 10,000 books in its stores.
The Priaulx Library reopened earlier this month after its annual month-long closure for maintenance.
The books, stored in the first floor storage room, are kept on rolling stacks to save space, but it meant they all had to be removed from the room to be properly catalogued.
‘It’s rather a messy job, and so of course you can’t, for health and safety reasons, do it when the library is open,’ said chief librarian Sue Laker.
‘Removing them, sorting them and replacing them, was a month’s work for five people.’
As well as cataloguing, the team at the library were looking out for signs of wear and tear, and doing some running repairs on volumes that were beginning to show signs of damage.
The library was originally a merchant’s house, built in the late 18th century, before being converting to a library in 1889.
Being an old domestic building it has some features that are not conducive to a modern library.
The floor in the stack room had to be reinforced in the 1970s to support the sheer weight of books and the 200-year-old building can be prone to damp.
‘One row of big books can weigh 35kg, so you can imagine just how much weight is being supported by the floor,’ said Miss Laker.
Staff have also been working to preserve the library’s collection of local newspapers that date back more than 230 years.
‘Some of the old broadsheets were stored in boxes, that were slightly two small and whose black paper covering was leeching into the old newspaper. These have been replaced with larger acid-free boxes to give the papers a bit of wiggle room.’
Two purpose-built new map chests, each worth £5,000, have also been installed on the first floor, and again the weight of the cabinets had to be taken into consideration as they are on the first floor.
‘Ideally we would have wanted them to be on top of each other, but the floor really can’t take the weight.’
Despite all the hard work, Miss Laker estimates that 14,000 books, out of the 40,000-plus that make up the collection, still need to be properly catalogued, plenty of work for the years to come.
