Over the February 4-5 weekend water pipes in the MIT Student Center in Boston froze and burst, causing significant damage throughout the building including to the fourth floor where the MIT Science Fiction Society club library is housed. The MITSFS Library, the world’s largest public open-shelf collection of science fiction, had an inch of water in it.  The administration/staff made no effort to rescue books, and some were soaked.  Students were denied access to the area to rescue books for several weeks, unable to assess how much mold damage was occurring.

Today MITSFS leadership emailed an update about the condition of the library and its operations. “After 2 weeks we were finally successful and discovered that while the majority of the library survived just fine, we did have some significant damage to some books – largely boxed duplicates and donations.” 

The message says the library has been open for limited hours, however, the 4th floor, where MITSFS is, remains closed today and likely will remain closed until September. And due to renovations which were already scheduled to begin in April, MIT is currently planning to move MITSFS out of that space and then move them back in during the late summer or fall.

Therefore MITSFS has put out an urgent call for volunteers:

We NEED HELP!  If you are located in the Boston area and have availability during the work week, work hours, we desperately need hands to help us with continued mitigation of the damage as well as with potentially packing up MITSFS. We have over 40,000 unique volumes of science fiction and fantasy – some of which of irreplaceable historical value.  This means we could use as much help as we can get in protecting this unique legacy and resource.  Please email [email protected] if you can help. 

Former Librarian George Phillies adds that the MITSFS Library’s 40,000-plus items, “include complete runs of Amazing, Astounding/Analog, Weird Tales except for the first two years, and many other magazines, all in bound volumes, enough so that the missing magazines were the likes of Kapitan Mors und sein lenkbares Luftschiff. (Pre-WWI, including interplanetary flight), really obscure stuff.  Hopefully a large part of it is intact.”

[Thanks to George Phillies for the story.]