Historical significance

Employees and volunteers from libraries and museums from around the state gathered in Williston Tuesday to learn about the status of the state's historical artifacts.

Tuesday's presentation at the Williston Community Library was coordinated by the North Dakota Cultural Heritage Initiative. The group is a partnership of 10 organizations focusing on networking with librarians, museum workers and others who work with historical materials and artifacts to help preserve them for others to enjoy.

Ann Jenks of the North Dakota State Historical Society said there are some serious findings from a major 2005 study conducted by the Heritage Preservation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, D.C. She said the study indicated of the 4.8 billion items held by the public, nearly 190 million of them need immediate attention or could be ruined.

"These items aren't just to be displayed for the public for a week or a year. We want these things to be available for the next generation and the generation after that," said Jenks.

Jenks said even worse statistics show that 80 percent of institutions that collect historical items don't have emergency or disaster plans that include plans for staff members to carry them out. She said just 2 percent of the total annual budgets for such organizations are spent on preservation activities in the last fiscal year.

"As a state historical society, we could do a lot better. It's just not very good for the state's materials; these items are where we came from," said Jenks.

Jenny Yearous, curator of collections at the North Dakota State Historical Society, told those in attendance a crucial factor to properly preserving historical items is to catalog them.

"If you don't know what you have, how can you protect it? How can you store it and care for it?" said Yearous.

Yearous said knowing what items you have help to know what kind of precautions need to be taken to keep them from deteriorating. Storing books requires different temperatures, lighting and humidity than say metal items, said Yearous.

She added with virtually all places facing tight budgets, simply doing what's best within your institution's means is important.

"What is going to get you your best bang for your buck? Is it with a few thousand dollars to improve your lights, or an HVAC system?," asked Yearous.

Jenks said a critical item for any institution is to create an emergency plan to protect items from being damaged or destroyed and then implement it.

"When the water is pouring into your facility is probably not the best time to come up with an emergency plan," said Jenks.

Jenks said key components of such a plan should include training staff, delegating responsibility of talking to emergency responders and the media to one person and keeping the plan up to date. Ways of keeping a plan up to date include keeping current contact lists of emergency responders, employees, new employees and when items are moved around.

Jenks said having a cache of even simple household items such as buckets, plastic sheeting and so on located in the building in case of an emergency should be considered.

As an example, she spoke about how this past spring when the snow and ice began to melt, a small leak was discovered in a storage room at the state historical society building.

"We found a leak which pretty soon turned into a pretty severe problem. We used sheet plastic to cover about 12 to 15 shelving rows of our book collection using items we had on hand. If we hadn't had that stuff in the building and someone had had to be sent to the store to get supplies, a huge amount of material would've been destroyed," said Jenks.

Jerry Kaup, director of the Minot Public Library, said having an emergency plan in place can help get further assistance during an emergency or disaster.

He said officials working to take action during an emergency make rapid decisions, so having a plan and being able to get their attention is important.

"It's good to have a plan in place and with your own volunteers. If they see you working with your own volunteers, or see a group of people working to save their neighborhood, they're going to give them help. They won't help you if you aren't visible because they only have limited resources," said Kaup.

Tuesday's meeting was one of eight N.D. Collections Conversations being held across the state in the coming weeks to get together those people who care for historical collections.