Librarians at the Australian National University (ANU) are progressing the mammoth task of restoring the university’s library collection following the damaging flood of February last year.
The flood left the lower level of the J.B. Chifley Library under water, resulting in the loss of over 100,000 monographs. It also damaged decades of information collected by library staff and ANU academics.
ANU Librarian, Roxanne Missingham said that since the flood, intense work had been under way to rebuild the ANU Library collection with more than 9,100 titles initially lost becoming available again as a result of purchasing and donations.
“The ANU community has been instrumental in rebuilding our collection,” Ms Missingham said.
“Donations have come from not just Australia, but around the world.”
She said the ANU Library had also made frequent trips to booksellers across Canberra to locate replacement titles, in particular to replace the humanities, history and politics collections that were disproportionally impacted by the flood.
“ANU Archives staff are currently in the process of unfreezing a number of books which were impacted by the flood,” Ms Missingham said.
“Many of these items are not held anywhere else in the world, or cannot be easily replaced. As such, they were placed into specialised freezers in the ANU Archives to preserve them while decisions were made about their long-term storage.”
She said one result of the flood was that the ANU Library will no longer store materials on Level One of the Chifley Library, or in the basement of the W.K. Hancock Library.
“As such, a major project is being undertaken to relocate collection materials from all ANU Library branches to make space for replacement titles,” Ms Missingham said.
