MITSFS’ Kat Allen has given an update about the club library materials that suffered water damage in February, and work to repair the club’s space on campus.
As previously reported, 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. Students initially were denied access to the area to rescue books for several weeks, but eventually they were able to assess the extensive mold damage that occurred (see “MITSFS Library Damage Assessed”.)
Kat Allen told NESFA President Rick Kovalcik:
We were able to get MIT to pay to have the collection moved by book preservation specialists, who could address the water damage issues. Now it is in special storage with that company, waiting for the student center renovations to complete—the original timeline for those renovations was August, but I don’t think we were given any updated dates when the scope increased due to the water-damage-caused asbestos remediation.
So “we’ll be back in August maybe, TBD” is the status of the Library, and the Society is back to being mostly online like we were during the pandemic.
[Thanks to Rick Kovalcik for the story.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
It’s a small point, but the MIT Student Center is in Cambridge, on the MIT campus.
I’m glad the school is paying for book preservation specialists.
How a major and prestigious university, a bastion of knowledge and inquiry, could allow so many books to be damaged and ruined just boggles the mind.
At least MIT is helping. They’re treating MITSFS a lot better than UMSFS is being treated by the UMass Administration.