MU helps library flooded by Katrina

Pure accident. That’s the way Charles Seavey explains how he decided to drive from Columbia to New Orleans to deliver books.

Seavey, a professor in the MU School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, had been out of phone and Internet contact for a week last month while on vacation in Vermont. When he returned to Columbia, he read a mass e-mail asking for a volunteer to drive 17 boxes of donated books to Southern University in New Orleans. The school is MU’s partner institution through an American Library Association program.

On June 21, he and three others loaded 17 boxes of books into a rented Ford Explorer and drove them to the trailer that has served as the southern university’s library since February. The books were donated or were duplicates of ones MU has.

“I kind of ambled in at the last moment,” said Seavey, who made the 630-mile drive with his wife.

Hurricane Katrina flooded the SUNO library’s first-floor reference collection, which remained underwater for three weeks and was not salvageable. Mold damaged collections on the second and third floors.

“I’ve been a librarian for 35 years, and I hate to see a library trashed like that, because they are important,” Seavey said. “There are a lot of things that are important, but this is important to me.”

Since last fall, MU has donated several thousand books, raised money for the school to buy new books and created an online gateway that allows SUNO’s students to link into MU’s free catalogued Internet resources, according to Rosanna Giusti, a reference librarian at SUNO.

SUNO has several partner institutions that have worked individually to help rebuild the library.

Rachel Brekus, an MU librarian and coordinator of the volunteer work, said she is trying to organize MU and the other partners to make their efforts more efficient.

“They (MU) have really taken the lead in trying to get the other libraries organized that have also adopted us,” said Giusti. “Being a librarian, I have some idea of the work, just the sheer work of going through the collections, boxing them up and even shipping them.”

“It’s just overwhelming that people so far away have devoted so much time trying to help us,” Giusti said. “In a very real sense they’ve helped us reopen this library.”

MU will continue to help SUNO rebuild its library. Brekus said the next step will be finding a way to set up an online donation so the money will go straight to the SUNO library.