Enusan: Wild Archival

There are things they never tell you when you begin your training as an archivist. One of those things is this: you will spend as much, if not more time, protecting the archives under your charge from weather, mold, and pests as you will playing with all the tresures in their boxes. Sure, the material you get to work with makes everything worth it, but dealing with that material takes about 10% of your time. The rest of it is spent chasing grant money, inspecting shelving for the teltale signs of critters, convincing the public that yours is a collection worth valuing and preserving, and chasing after chaotic data.

It's all fun of course. It can just be exciting in ways you don't at first anticipate.

Today was my first official day on the job. I've bitten off quite a chunk of work for the next few months, and don't anticipate being able to swallow quite all of it, but I'll do my best. And I can't help but enjoy the perks of my position in the meantime.

I'm living up in the mountains, literally inside a national park. My commute at the moment is a one minute walk from one cabin to the other. The living quarters I've been given is a little room on the end of a larger log cabin. The nights here are still cold, but I've got a little space heater that keeps things at a pleasant 65 degrees through the night. And the view is pretty much ideal. There's a large open space in front of the cabin where guineapig sized gophers chase each other, and I've already seen elk wander out of the tree line and graze about. The mountains poke out of the treeline, and I've got a direct view of Grand Teton Peak. Yesterday was so warm and pleasant I spent most of it reading and writing on the porch in the company of a particularly loud bumblebee. At one point a humming bird buzzed by, hovered a few feedtfrom my head, took a moment to ponder my existance, and then flittered away. That's my life right now.

It's not all play and pristine wildlife though. Yesterday I brought a few visitors into the archives to look around. They were inspecting the bookshelves when one of them said, "There's a mouse in one of your traps." I hadn't even really started work at this point, and didn't even know there were traps in the building, so my immediate reaction was, oh great, I'll take care of it tomorrow.

Well, today is tomorrow, and as I was going through my predecessor's work I found a folder on pest control in a museum setting, complete with survey forms and replacement sticky traps. Welp, I figured, I guess I should get this done with now and put it behind me.

I go to where the guest pointed out the first trap, and sure enough there's a little tail poking out of the cover. At least it's not moving, I think to myself, and lean over to more closely inspect it. Turn out there was more than a mouse in that trap. The entire thing was covered in little brown spiders. Immediately the archivist in me is thinking, "Is that a bad thing?" while the wuss in me is thinking, "Oh God, I have to touch that don't I?"

What's more, there were 11 of these traps, including one with a second, bigger mouse in it. I spit out some four letter words to steel myself up, put on some archival gloves, and got to work collecting them. Once I had them all in a neat little line in the middle of the room the really fun part started. I had to inspect every trap for signs of species dangerous to organic material such as books or artifacts. That meant opening every trap up and counting every ant, spider, and whatever else managed to get itself stuck.

These traps had been set over a year ago. There was a LOT of dead things to count. The spiders were probably the worst, and they also made up about 90% of the count. Spiders = ok for the archives but kinda creepy for me, particularly since there is a slight chance that a majority of them were brown recluses. However, none of the 100+ insects that I had the pleasure of inspecting were noted as particularly dangerous to collections, so all in all the trapping meant good things. The mice were worrisome, but two in a year didn't tell me much. One was bloated and the other looked like it had deflated, so they were probably at different stages in the grand circle of death, but beyond that I could tell little else.

For a moment I considered taking a picture of my gruesome little collection so other people could share in the disgustingness of it, but I decided to spare people. Instead I wrote up my tallies, threw all the traps in the garbage outside (far away from the archives), and then scrubbed my hands three times.

When they said these archives have been neglected, they really meant it. Every corner is covered in cobwebs and dust, and I've spotted more than a few spiderwebs and sacs of whatever it is spiders put in sacs. Lunch and babies most likely.

And even as I type this there is -something- going about its business in the roof just above my head. there's white stuff that I'm going to assume is insulation starting to come out of the holes in the boards up there, so that's going to be something we have to take care of real quick.

While I think most of the material in here has escaped damage so far, I haven't actually taken a good look at the books that occupy a quarter of the space. I'm kind of dreading the discovery of mold, or silverfish, or maybe a nice pile of mouse poo, but that's the job.

On top of all this, there's some concern that the area will experience flooding in the next few days. This means I'm bumping up my disaster preparedness project to tomorrow.

I haven't even had a chance to go through the collection itself yet. I have no idea what's in these cabinets right now, which means I have a lot of exploring to look forward to. I'm just hoping I've seen the last of year old dead mice.

And now, what everyone is waiting for: the pictures.