LibraryTechtonics

Earlier this week, I received an email from my friend Jen Snider, who is president of LISSA at Simmons GSLIS, saying that they were going on a field trip to visit The Charles S. Morgan Library at the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), and asking if I’d like to go, so I decided to take advantage of this nifty opportunity.

The Fire Library houses fire, electrical, building, and water codes, as well as coordinates the writing, publishing, and sale of codes, and their library subsists on the sale of the codes (and their library is no shabby joint, and I’ve got pictures to prove it). The library also houses maps, videos, and journals, all pertaining to fire and fire issues.

Sue Marsh, the librarian, has been with the library for a year, and has seen the initiation of so many interesting digitization projects at the library. The current project consists of scanning the many codes they write, publish, sell, and house in the collection to indexed .pdf format, so that they are not only text searchable, but available in digital format for quick and easy access by NFPA employees (they may publish these to the web someday for public use). An upcoming project consists of scanning, cataloging, and archive-friendly storing the many, many historical photos they have of everything from actual fires to past office holders of the NFPA.

Recently, they’ve had a few movie-makers in their library doing research, and a request from a middle-schooler doing a project, but most often their patrons are engineers and business owners who need information on recent and past codes. However, the library is open to the public, so if you want to, say, research the Coconut Grove Fire and see which codes were developed as a result of the investigation, they can help you with that. They also accept reference requests by phone and by email, if you ever have a question.

Such a cool tour. Many thanks to Ms. Marsh and her staff for allowing us to visit.

Tags: librarianship