AALL’s meeting in New Orleans in July provided some special opportunities for members to contribute to the city’s reconstruction efforts. On Friday, July 13 many of us went to work with either Habitat for Humanity, Second Harvest, or the Louisiana State Museum.
The Habitat activity started at 7:00 a.m. when about 70 AALL volunteers met in front of the convention center and rode 2 buses to the work site in the upper 9th ward. The work site is called the Musicians’ Village because many local musicians, including Harry Connick, Jr., are involved with the rebuilding there. After a brief overview of projects, about 20 people painted a house, while the rest moved wall frames and cleaned up around the site during the morning. In the afternoon the group hammered a floor system into a house. The Habitat folks provided water for everyone, and made sure volunteers took water breaks every hour, as it was a very hot and sunny day. The air conditioned buses provided a much needed respite during the lunch hour.
While these may seem like small steps, I know from the exhaustion and sunburns that I saw that the volunteers for Habitat each made a mighty contribution by the time they finished at 3:00 p.m. According to volunteer Roy Sturgeon, the Habitat houses are elevated 3 - 4 feet above ground to protect them from future flooding and “all look the same, except they’re painted different colors and look like rows of rainbows.” How wonderful that librarians could contribute to building rainbows in New Orleans!
There were two groups of approximately 25 volunteers at Second Harvest for morning and afternoon shifts. They worked at Second Harvest’s food-packing facility in Jefferson County. Their bus trip took them past some hard-hit areas and the bus driver shared stories of many victims. On the assembly line, the volunteers sorted and packed food into boxes of different types of food (e.g., protein, vegetables, breakfast foods), and then stacked them on pallets. Their efforts were rewarded when the morning group of librarians learned from Second Harvest staff that they had packed enough food to feed 5,000 people! The afternoon shift then doubled the contribution of AALL members.
Some of us were intimidated by the thought of working in the heat and humidity of New Orleans in mid-July, and quickly filled up the available spots at the Louisiana State Museum. Since this is the project I worked on I can say from first hand experience that we all found it to be a fascinating and rewarding venture.
The first ‘adventurous’ thing about it was that we found ourselves being taken to a secret storage facility of the Museum - in a location not to be revealed. Amy Hale-Janeke, our AALL coordinator, divided us up to work on three projects. Several librarians examined a collection of original watercolors by Alvyk Boyd Cruise, a New Orleans artist employed by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. His watercolors expressed his view of the colorful buildings and architecture found in the French Quarter. The project involved first examining the pieces for wear, mold, paint loss, etc. and then reviewing a 30-year-old inventory to be sure descriptions of the paintings were accurate and up to date.
The second group worked on a catalog related project that involved comparing lists of holdings to match items or identify items missing from a collection’s inventory. The third ‘group’ (actually only Amy and I) did data entry of accessioned items into the Museum’s database (catalog). We were each given files which contained a curator’s evaluation and description of an item and its ‘place’ within the Museum’s holdings. Once trained on the database, it was very interesting to compare the organization of a museum database to the methods that librarians use (AACR2 and our cataloging systems). Being familiar with archival records, I see it as sort of a continuum of organization schemes: library -> archives -> museums. All different but related.
The really cool part of this project was the variety of items we dealt with. Amy’s files included an upright bass used by a famous jazz player and a trumpet used by another famous jazz musician. The most interesting items I worked on were donations for a new collection that the museum is developing relating to Hurricane Katrina, such as a Red Cross Debit Card distributed to survivors to use as cash, and a sign from a bus window allowing the vehicle (which had been driven from the northern U.S.) into the flood zone to assist in the rescue.
There was another perk of the working at the Museum, besides being indoors in air conditioning. We were given a tour of some very special items in storage. These included a working gramophone that still plays wax cylinders, and a large collection of clothing and Mardi Gras costumes from various eras.
Most importantly, all of us who gave our time to helping New Orleans recover from Hurricane Katrina came away with new insights, new friends, and the knowledge that we had made a contribution to the city, its people, and cultural resources. Not only was New Orleans a little better off after we left, but so were we.
Editor’s Note: Photos of the volunteers in action are available at www.lb5.uscourts.gov/AALL/volunteer.html.