Mouldy books

I had to drive the storage round twice this week. At the same time I did a project. We are going to move many of the journals from the open collection to the stacks. Before we can do that we have to check if there is actually room for them at the different call numbers. It was a long list and I didn't have time to check all of them, but with the help of the other colleague involved in this project, we got a complete list by the end of the week. I would say we can move back 80% of them to the stacks.

We discovered some water-damaged books at the new storage this week. There was a leaking pipe two years ago and apparently we didn't notice back then that some books had been affected by the water. Now I had to remove about 15 books that looked awful - black mould was growing on them. There is no way we can save them, they will have to be thrown away. Touching mouldy books would really require a different type of gear, but I didn't know what to expect so I didn't have any gloves. I normally don't have to handle "bio-hazard" material...

Saturday was the national holiday but I only noticed that because the library was closed. I had to find something else to do and chose a visit to my favorite mall. It was crowded and not as nice as other times. I had lunch at Ikea and then bought a jar of cloudberry jam. Today I was at work like usual, but this time I did research for someone else. I got a request from a man who will give his wife her family history as a birthday gift. To 75% it was very easy because those ancestors lived in the same parish, but the remaining 25% will be difficult because they originated in Norway. There will be at least two empty boxes on the ancestor chart and that bothers me very much.

The weather here is a little out of the ordinary. It was the coldest May in over 50 years. It has changed now and it's around 16-18 centigrades in the daytime, but I wouldn't say it's warm. It's not a pleasant start of the summer season.