On Sunday, March 16, at approximately 10:45 a.m. a library faculty member arrived in the Ablah Library Building to discover water running down the elevator shafts. Water from a pipe between the men’s and women’s restrooms on the first floor was pouring into the Lower Level. By the time that the water was shut off to the building, about 4-inches of water had flooded much of the Libraries’ 50,000 square-foot Lower Level area. The bottom shelves of the stacks are about 5 inches off the floor, so the water did not reach the main stacks collections in the R-Z call number ranges which are located on the Lower Level. These ranges include the disciplines of medicine (including nursing), engineering, & technology. Quick action by library staff kept significant water out of the vaults of Special Collections and University Archives, so there was no damage to materials held there!
Since that Sunday morning, recovery efforts have been underway and for more than two weeks crews worked around the clock. The Lower Level is currently closed to the public and will remain so indefinitely. The materials in the R-Z call number ranges have been packed up and moved to off-campus storage so that water can be extracted from under the shelving. All microform collections have also been moved to off-campus storage. An exact timeline for the return of these collections to campus has yet to be determined, but it will be several months. In the meantime, researchers who need print materials from those subject areas are encouraged to use the Libraries’ interlibrary loan services (https://libraries.wichita.edu/ILL), and we will locate what is needed and borrow it from another library. All WSU digital collections (including streaming audio & video) remain active and can be accessed via the University Libraries’ discovery function (https://www.wichita.edu/services/libraries/index.php).
Materials from the WSU Special Collections & University Archives will be available to researchers by request (https://libraries.wichita.edu/sc/contact).
In summary, we are all definitely being inconvenienced by this unfortunate incident, but it could have been much worse for our WSU teaching & research community if there had been significant damage to the physical collections.
