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.
For many years, the WSU Libraries have had a “warehouse” type of collection development strategy, led in part by the way in which university libraries have been historically evaluated and ranked. The mere quantity of items in the collections was the sole determining factor of these evaluations and rankings. Consequently, practically anything that came in the door was added to the collections, regardless of the effectiveness of the material’s support of the teaching and research goals of our University. You may recall that several years ago, the WSU Libraries reached a 2-million item threshold – with great fanfare! With this quantitative rubric in place, even as collections moved to digital platforms, there remained a disincentive to withdraw outdated and duplicative print materials.
These singly-focused quantitative measurements are no longer how libraries are evaluated and ranked – thank goodness! Today’s collection assessment rubrics consider, with much more accuracy, the actual use and quality of our collections – both print and digital. In the WSU Libraries, our efforts now are focused on withdrawal of outdated and duplicative print materials. Almost a year and a half ago, we began systematically discarding print journal runs for which there is a digital version available. Calculations when this process began revealed that duplicate journals occupied about 7½ linear miles of shelving occupying about 20,000 square feet of space in the building that could be available for other uses (see discussion of the Anthropology Museum). Using staff and student workers, we had been removing about 600 linear feet of print journals each week. Following the March 16th flood on the Lower Level, we determined that remediation staffing could assist with this process. It was considerably more cost effective to discard the remaining identified print journals in the R-Z call number range during the flood remediation process than pay to box them, store them, return them, and reshelve them – only to discard them anyway. Consequently, during the weeks immediately following the flood, the staff-augmented withdrawal process resulted in a considerably larger number of print journals being discarded. We also used this time to selectively withdraw outdated materials that had been located on the Lower Level, particularly in the disciplines related to medicine (“best practices nursing manuals,” for example, from the 1950s, 60s, & 70s).
With the approved renovations that will bring the Anthropology Museum to the 2nd floor, we began withdrawing the print journal collections in the Q call number range (broad discipline: sciences) at the beginning of March. That process was interrupted by the flood’s more intensified efforts in the R-Z ranges, but has since resumed. After completing the Qs, this project will continue with the remaining collections on the 2nd and 3rd floors.
At the beginning of 2025, the Libraries’ faculty also began to develop a discipline-based algorithm to determine which materials in the Libraries’ collections get little use and could be moved to the Compact Storage Facility (CSF) in the Ablah building. The criteria for relocation to the CSF: only those books purchased more than 25 years ago. For those purchased more than 25 years ago, they would be relocated to the CSF if (1) they had not circulated in the last 25 years in the disciplines of arts, humanities, and social sciences or (2) they had not circulated in the last 15 years in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, health professions, and business.
We have not and will not withdraw materials (including journal runs) that are related to local, regional, and state history as well as imprints from Kansas publishers – regardless of the discipline in which it may fall! Also, journals related to art (where resolution quality is important) are not being discarded pending further evaluation of available digital alternatives.
It is also important to note that disposal guidelines for university-owned property are set by the State and the University Libraries follow those guidelines.
On Friday, March 7, the Wichita State University Libraries officially became a member of MOBIUS (https://mobiusconsortium.org), a multi-state consortium of over 65 academic libraries stretching from Iowa to Texas that provides access to shared resources, services, and expertise. WSU is the first large research university in Kansas to become a part of the MOBIUS Consortium, but we anticipate the addition of others shortly.
Through its OpenRS platform, the members of MOBIUS share more than 29 million items through a courier service that operates 5 days a week. By the end of 2025, the 2-million-plus items held in the WSU collections will be added to this shared system. WSU students and faculty will be able to locate and directly request print items from our partner libraries without having to go through the traditional Interlibrary Loan processes, thereby improving the speed with which these materials are delivered.
We are in the initial phases of linking our systems together and anticipate that all systems will be “go” by the end of the calendar year! As the set-up gets a little further along and more definitive implementation dates have been determined, WSU-wide announcements will be made.
In an Executive Order, the White House announced on March 14 further non-statutory reductions of the Federal bureaucracy. Included in the list of agencies impacted by this action was the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
About 50% of the databases provided state-wide are funded with monies received through an IMLS block grant that is administered by the State Library in Topeka.
On April 11, all of the KBOR Library Deans met with Ray Walling, State Librarian of Kansas, to discuss the potential implications of the current “pause” on some IMLS funding streams. Thus far, the IMLS block grants to states continue to be funded (Ray had even received a payment earlier that day!).
Most of the databases provided through the State Library are supporting K-12 and public library constituencies. At WSU, we have completed a review of those State-wide resources that are relevant to our higher education mission and identified where WSU risks lie should access to particular State-funded databases be cancelled and WSU (or a group of KBOR institutions) would need to replace the funding of those databases for our institutional constituencies. At present, this risk has been determined to be very low.
The administration and faculty of the University Libraries continue to monitor the situation.
Long before the Lower Level flood of March 16, plans were underway for the creation of a new space in the Ablah building to house the Holmes Anthropology Museum (currently located in Neff Hall).
On February 26, the first meeting with the architects was held. They are designing a new home for the Museum on the south side of the Ablah Building’s second floor. The area on the second floor will include a state-of-the-art gallery for displays as well as work space for the Museum’s staff and student workers. There will also be storage space for some of the Museum’s collections. Additional storage space for larger items is being created on the Library’s Lower Level.
A new entrance to the building on the south side of the Ablah building (currently an emergency exit) will lead directly to the new Anthropology Museum. Those needing ADA access to the Museum will continue to use the Library’s elevators.
Construction is scheduled to begin during the Fall 2025 Semester. To prepare this space on the 2nd floor, the collections currently located in that area (all in the Q classification range) will be temporarily relocated to the Compact Storage Facility (CSF) on the Lower Level once approval has been received to begin using the CFS again.
