By Keeper and Executive Director Tom Hardiman
Back in 2019, engineers gave us a warning that our Foye building was at least 100% overloaded with books, newspapers, and archival materials. With heroic help from staff, board, and volunteers, we were able to move 50% of the materials to offsite storage. After three years in North Hampton, one year at One Congress Street, and three years at 170 State Street, the collections hit the road again to 10 Middle Street, the former Children’s Room of the old public library. We had a very narrow time window between the end of the lease at State Street and the start of the sublease from Portsmouth Historical Society at Middle Street It was also January, which made the weather window very tight.
Our library staff strained every muscle and sinew to move hundreds of book boxes and newspapers off the shelves at State Street to move the shelves to 10 Middle. Professional movers transported the contents to the newly installed shelving. This would not have been possible without truly superhuman efforts from the library staff. They literally put their bodies on the line to make sure that our offsite collections were moved in a way that preserved their hard-fought efforts to maintain a systematic order that will benefit us all moving ahead.
Our hope is that this is going to facilitate an easy transition into moving research collections to the future Portsmouth Archive Center, a public-private partnership with the Historical Society, Strawbery Banke, and the City. That said, some of our collections are already hitting the road again. In preparation for the move, staff and volunteers spent weeks inventorying our vast offsite newspaper collection and identified many, many duplicates. Special Projects Archivist Susan Kindstedt connected with the New Hampshire Historical Society and they graciously accepted the transfer of all our duplicates. By serendipity, Susan also connected with colleagues from UNH about a large-scale digitization project for newspapers which have never been previously scanned or microfilmed. As a result of that kismet, our probably unique run of the Portsmouth Chronicle is being foldered and boxed to ship out to the scanners. The final product will be searchable world-wide on the Internet Archive. Please join me in thanking all of our staff for their incredible commitment to our collections and mission.
Uncle Willy and Trigger may love being on the road more than our fragile library collections do, but like Willy, we do it all for the fans.
