Freezing temperatures and earthquakes

Today contained two important milestones for me. The only problem (if you want to call it that) is that I missed one of them.  At 1:30am a 4.1 earthquake hit about ten miles northwest of us.  Fortunately, based on our site check this morning, it appears that nothing at the museum was damaged.  Sadly, I slept through it. Does this mean it doesn't count as my first earthquake? Jessica promises there will be more where that one came from.   Hopefully not for a little while yet, since one of my current projects is to prepare a list of supplies the museum should have on hand in case of earthquakes.  I've been doing research online, contacted several local groups through email, and tomorrow morning I have a phone appointment with someone from FEMA for some more brainstorming.

IVMD's off site storage containers

The second milestone was as much for the museum as for me.  Today we brought our first couple of boxes up from the off site storage and put them in the museum's freezer.  All my library/archive friends are probably quietly clapping while the rest of my friends are wondering if they read that sentence correctly.  Papers in the freezer?  Yes. You read that right: papers went in the freezer.  Why the freezer you ask? Well, freezers are good for more than just ice cream in the archival world.  Papers that have spent the last thirty years of their lives in a non-climate controlled off site storage container do not get to go right into a nice, clean, climate controlled archive.  Who knows what sort of insects, insect eggs, etc. the papers are carrying? So they'll spend the next three days in the freezer, two days out, and then back in the freezer for three more days before we sit down with them and sort the papers into specific series and folders.  Jessica and I were happy to learn that the freezer can hold more than just the two boxes worth of papers we brought up.  So things will hopefully go a little faster in the future and I may start dividing my time more between the museum lab and the off site containers instead of being off site most of the time.