HCL Preservation Department Volunteer Opportunity

One of our LIT program graduates is volunteering at the Preservation Department in the downtown Central Library and tells me there are volunteer opportunities to work on various projects under the direction of Frank Hurley, the head of Preservation.

She writes:
"I have been volunteering there since June, and I really like it. There is a wide variety of tasks, from bookbinding to replacing plastic covers on books. Some of the projects we're focusing on right now are organizing certain periodicals to be sent to a bindery (I worked on issues of Glamour yesterday from 1965-1980 - fascinating stuff), and putting together new folders of sheet music (as a preservation method, a lot of pieces of sheet music in the library collection that were damaged were sent to the U of M for preservation photocopies to be made. Now that we have the photocopies, we have to fold them and put them in new folders, then attach new labels. We end up recycling the original pieces of sheet music, so if anyone is particularly interested in music, they could definitely take some sheet music home). Other projects include gluing loose pages of books back in, replacing the endsheets of books, binding books through handsewing and other methods, and something I'm working on is encapsulating very old sheet music (from the 1860s to the early 1900s), i.e. making plastic cases for pieces of sheet music to better protect the music. There are a lot of really interesting old artifacts that come through the Preservation department.
If anyone is interested in volunteering, Please contact:

Barb McKenzie
Volunteer and Intern Coordinator
Hennepin County Library
12601 Ridgedale Drive
Minnetonka, MN 55305
bamckenzie@hclib.org

612-543-8579