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Minutes of the March  12, 2003 Meeting

Minutes of Meeting In Board of Trustees
Trustees' Collections Committee Wednesday, March 12, 2003

A meeting of the Trustees' Collections Committee was held in the Trustees Room of the Johnson Building at 9:30 a.m.

Present at the meeting were: Trustees James Carroll, Berthé M. Gaines and William O. Taylor; President Bernard A. Margolis; Dennis Davis, Senior Project Manager for Industrial Development, Boston Redevelopment Authority; Rosaria Salerno, City Clerk; Dr. John McColgan, Deputy Archivist; Kathleen Kirleis, Chief Financial Officer; P.A. d'Arbeloff, Executive Director, the Boston Public Library Foundation; Edward Maheigan, Budget and Procurement Manager; and Jamie McGlone, Clerk to the Trustees.

Mr. William O. Taylor, Chairman of the Trustees' Collections Committee, presiding.

The first item on the order of business was the approval of Minutes for the Trustees' Collections Meeting on January 21, 2003. On a motion duly made and seconded, the Minutes for the Trustees' Collections Committee Meeting on January 21, 2003 were approved.

The Chairman reviewed the principal purposes of the meeting which were to hear updates on the progress being made toward the selection and acquisition of property, the continuing relocation of collections and holdings from the Charlestown Service building, and the ongoing planning efforts for increasing the storage capacity of the Library's remote storage facility in Norwood, MA for the purpose of building a new state-of-the-art consolidated storage facility, herein referred to as the Boston Heritage Center.

Mr. Dennis Davis provided an update on the ongoing efforts being made toward the potential site selection and acquisition of property for the development of the Boston Heritage Center. Construction of the storage facility would provide for the appropriate storage conditions for the Boston Public Library and City Archives archival and retrospective collections as well as providing convenient public access within the City to these vast collections. Once a property has been acquired, the Boston Redevelopment Authority would undertake a space planning use study for the site for developing the Boston Heritage Center project.

President Margolis and the Chief Financial Officer reported on the enormous amount of work, coordinated by volunteer Mr. Gunars Rutkovskis, ongoing at the Charlestown Service Building to pare down and relocate the collections and holdings in anticipation of the Library's move to totally vacate the facility.

The relocation of holdings include the historic Jordan Collection of Children's Literature to the Library's storage facility in Norwood, MA and the remaining holdings represent vast collections of 19th century newspapers, 5,000 boxes of non-cataloged gift books, City Archives materials, and City directories which total 35,000 square feet of material.

The Committee discussed the desirability of locating storage space to temporarily accommodate the remaining 35,000 square feet of material which would complete the entire relocation of all materials and holdings from the Charlestown Service building.

Dr. McColgan suggested contacting the Advanced Records Management Services Center located in Danvers, MA which is the outsource records center contracted by the City Archives to store some of their collections. The Chairman said that that the records storage center would be a good option to pursue as a means to temporarily relocate the remaining collections and to expedite vacating the Charlestown site.

Dr. John McColgan also reported that approximately 11,000 volumes of the City of Boston Tax Records, 1896-1944 are housed at the Charlestown facility and efforts are underway at the City Archives current facility to find storage space for these permanent official Assessing Department tax records. To that end, a shelving vendor has been retained to undertake a space and cost analysis study to determine the feasibility of relocating the collection to the City Archives.

In addition, the Library had also undertaken measures to prepare the Charlestown Building for the winter heating season coupled with a restoration of the concrete on the exterior façade of the building. The Charlestown Service Building, which is owned by the Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston except for a middle parcel of land owned by the City, contains a total of 150,000 square feet.

Meanwhile, the installation of the ten-foot high shelving units at the Library's remote storage facility in Norwood, MA has been completed. Donated to the Boston Public Library by the Boston Athenaeum, these stacks replace the original seven-foot high shelving units and increase the shelving capacity by nearly thirty percent in order to accommodate for the short-term relocation of nearly one-half of the Charlestown Service building holdings and its contents. Upon the completion of the relocation of the Jordan Collection, the storage facility in Norwood will be filled to near capacity.

There being no further business, the meeting of the Trustees' Collections Committee adjourned at 10:15 a.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Jamie McGlone
Clerk to the Trustees