107 ceiling tiles fell during the quake and those that remain are a safety hazard. An engineer is coming March 5th to see if all of the ceiling tiles should be removed. The Engineering and Fisheries-Oceanography branch libraries, especially the former, are our most impacted public facilities. Circulation, Reserve, and Reference services are available at each unit, but they both suffered extensive stack damage and, because of safety concerns, most of their collections are inaccessible to staff and users at this time. Because Fisheries-Oceanography is a smaller collection, we plan to start recovery work there first.
Engineering is our largest branch library and suffered extensive stack collapse.
It s anticipated that it will take several months before all parts of the collection can be reopened. Materials from the Engineering Library will be temporarily unavailable for Cascade requests until then. In the meantime, we have begun discussing how to expedite interlibrary borrowing and article delivery for these and any other quake-impacted collections and should have more detailed information to share next week. The Math Research branch library suffered some stack damage. Circulation, Reserve, and Reference services are available but staff and users have had no access to their collections since the earthquake because of safety concerns.