The entire Redwood community would like to thank the Redwood parents and others who contribute to the Redwood Foundation for a couple valuable new additions to the Library this winter.
LCD Monitors
Over the break 22 new LCD monitors replaced the old CRTs which were pretty much the last ones in the school. The new monitors don’t just look great. They take up a lot less room on the desktop, allowing more space for kids to work, and are a lot more energy efficient than the older monitors.
Barkives Cabinets
The other addition is a new flat-file cabinet to hold our entire collection of the Redwood Bark, the school newspaper.
The Bark project was started several years ago when journalism teacher, Tom Sivertsen, and I, asked the Foundation for a grant to bind the newspaper in an archivally safe way. In the end we were able to preserve two copies of the Bark from the first issue (October 17, 1958) through the present. One copy is kept in the Library and available for public viewing, the other one will be kept in the journalism classroom.
After discussing the possibilities we decided that the best solution for preserving the newspapers was to use custom-made binders. Tom found a local bindery which could provide the binders. We ordered custom-made acetate sheet protectors from another vendor. Then we had to get to work.
Each Bark was disassembled and the individual leaves were placed in the protective covers. This whole process took more than a year. Mr. Sivertsen was able to use his journalism students to work on the project and the Library had the help of student aides and parent and student volunteers. Overseeing the Library project was volunteer, Carol Aceves. Early in 2009 we had gotten all the pages in their protective covers and placed in 35 binders.
All along we had talked about how we would store the binders. Since they are quite large (19x13x2) and heavy when filled, I thought a flat file cabinet would be the best way to store them. Last spring I asked the Foundation for funds to purchase some cabinets available through one of our library vendors. At the time the Foundation was low on funds so the project was not funded. However, this fall we put in an identical proposal (the cost of the cabinets hadn’t changed) and the Foundation was able to fund the request.
The cabinets were delivered January 7th and the library specialist, Karen Barrett, and I set them up with a little help from Redwood’s fine maintenance staff. They now securely hold our very valuable collections of school newspapers and make them accessible to all library patrons.
One of the missions of the library is to help preserve the history of Redwood and we feel this is a great step in making a great archive of historical materials available to the entire community. We welcome one and all to come by and peruse the entire collection in the Bessie Chin Library.
