What can be done with 6,000+ hard-copy books and a forensic engineer's lifetime paper collection in the "Age of Information"?

May 2, 2009 7:58 PM

Is there a person or organization which will pick up and make productive use of a (non-famous) engineer/scientist's lifelong collection of books and papers? The local university libraries and relevant engineering organizations no longer accept hard-copy materials. I'm living across the country, and the family can't keep paying storage cube rental after my father's death. It's going to have to be an all-or-nothing donation in the next two or three months, or everything gets sent to a landfill. The storage facility is in the Ann Arbor, MI (USA) area - please see the extended explanation for details.

My father, a consulting forensic engineer, amassed a large collection of engineering and science books. There's also a 40-plus year compilation of case files, photographs, blueprints, etc. concerning hundreds of studies of industrial accidents, automobile collisions, environmental issues, patent applications and the like - he never threw anything away. Any litigation involved has been concluded at least seven years ago, well past state or federal obligations to preserve or destroy notes and evidence.

Following his death last year, my family would like to empty the storage cubes these materials occupy to save the cost of rental. We're talking about 600+ standard-sized banker's document boxes. Unfortunately, the local university libraries, engineering organizations, and legal groups have all refused to accept any part of the collection, claiming that "we don't deal with paper anymore".

I'm trying to deal with this from 1,200 miles away, and the most practical and economical solution involves sending it all straight to a landfill.

I admit to a sentimental attachment to the value of my father's work during his lifetime. He's one of engineering's unsung heroes - kept the steel industry in America alive for 20 extra years; patented a process to make nitrogen fertilizer as a byproduct of steel-making, which in turn made the Green Revolution economically feasible; made industrial machinery, transportation, electrical power distribution and nuclear power safer, etc..

It would be irresponsible to discard the hard-earned historical wisdom gained from studying how things fail. The recent banking crisis is the perfect example of wise restraint undermined as successive generations lost their recollection of the consequences of error. Dad worked on the Holland Tunnel disaster, Three Mile Island, alternative energy development during the 1970's... the list goes on.

There's also the study of the evolution of scientific knowledge - the book library under consideration covers every aspect of engineering and most branches of science, mathematics and medicine in editions dating back to the 1920's. If you visit a modern engineering library, "obsolete" volumes are mostly gone from the shelves. The older books in Dad's library had what are now considered errors and oversimplifications. Nonetheless, it's worth having them, if for no reason other than to see how far we've come in what period of time and how we got to the current state of awareness.

In short, I'm asking if anyone knows who would be interested in picking all of this up and making good use of it. Geography, limited funds and time make it impossible for me to itemize and arrange partial pickups of books or other materials - it's really going to have to be all or nothing.

I'd rather that the recipient wasn't a used book dealer looking for free inventory and willing to discard papers to get it, but that's still better than sending it all to a landfill.

Thank you, MeFites, for applying your wisdom to solving this problem. Interested parties should respond to MeFi Mail.

posted by patience_limited to technology (23 comments total)

The older books in Dad's library had what are now considered errors and oversimplifications. Nonetheless, it's worth having them, if for no reason other than to see how far we've come in what period of time and how we got to the current state of awareness.

Any library that wants such books for archival purposes already has far more than they need. They don't need yours.

As far as the papers, you might consider having them scanned.
posted by grouse at 8:18 PM on May 2 [1 favorite]

Maybe another person in the same business would be interested? You might search for legal expert referral services and the like and email the people there - they might know of listservs, etc., where such people hang out and you could post your offer there.
posted by moxiedoll at 8:19 PM on May 2

Have you contacted the relevant academic departments at the University of Michigan? They might know a professor who might have some use for it for a class, or might even know a student who might find it interesting or useful.
posted by availablelight at 8:21 PM on May 2

Your problem will be finding someplace to take the whole thing with no restrictions. Perhaps compile a list of universities with major engineering programs and prepare a generic e-mail (using what you wrote above as a start, but with more details if possible) to send to their libraries/archives. Carnegie Mellon might be a good place to start, because of the steel connection.

Actually, the more I think about it, perhaps a smaller college that has an engineering program might more likely to take the entire collection with few restrictions. Smaller, unsung institutions are sometimes more receptive to personal collections of this type than the "big boys" like U of Michigan. I know that my undergrad alma mater, West Virginia Wesleyan College, has an engineering program, and it wouldn't hurt to contact their library about this.

Good luck with this!
posted by arco at 8:27 PM on May 2

You might try contacting departments that have programs in the History of Science or Science, Technology & Society. Some programs that might be interested:

MIT
Harvard
Penn

You might also try the History of Science Society, which could direct you to an interested party, or give you access to relevant listservs/mailing lists.

Finally, this is a bit of a longshot, but you might try contacting the Chemical Heritage Foundation . Although it is focused primarily on the history of chemistry, there is a chance that they might have an interest in your father's collection. And as a private foundation, they might have more flexibility to take it on.
posted by googly at 8:58 PM on May 2

I've already contacted University of Michigan's Engineering Library, Graduate Library and the Industrial Engineering Department, as well as various personal contacts in the library system and Engineering School there. I've also contacted a couple of Detroit-area engineering and legal associations.

American Association of University Women might accept the books for donation for their scholarship fund sale, if I deliver them myself, in batches, to multiple locations - not an option in my case.

There is one legal expert company that might be interested, but they were on the opposing side of just about everything my father was involved in, and donating there would be of no benefit to the public.

Thanks for the idea about smaller engineering schools with needy libraries, though - I'll give that a try.
posted by patience_limited at 9:09 PM on May 2

You can probably donate the books to an organization which will send them to Africa. One of the student organizations at my university (either IEEE or HKN) had a drive last year for this purpose. The Google lists a number of possibilities, one of which is Books for Africa.
posted by Wet Spot at 9:26 PM on May 2

You say you've contacted libraries -- have you contacted any archives in the area? The books are probably of no interest to anyone, but the papers could potentially be of interest to an archive if (and this is the big if) they shed light on issues, personalities, or events that the archive has a focus on.
posted by Forktine at 11:19 PM on May 2

Have you tried contacting the google books project? They're scanning in vast quantities of old books from libraries and archives, both in and out of copyright works, and making them accessible free online via library computers - they've recently made a blanket settlement with publishers to allow them to do this (anything printed after 1923 is likely to still be in copyright)

AFAIK, they're only taking books from large archives, but given the size and age of the collection, they may be able to take them.

Another possibility is the universal library project - they've digitised over a million books, and are continuing to scan and host more. They can only display 10% of a book still in copyright, but they do scan the whole thing, and it sounds like quite a few of yours will pass back into the public domain in the next few years.

I don't think they'd be interested in the case files or his records though - if you were prepared to scan them yourself, you can submit them to the internet archive who will host them for you freely, especially if you're willing to submit them under a creative commons licence (assuming the copyright of his own writings has passed to your family)
posted by ArkhanJG at 1:41 AM on May 3

You can probably donate the books to an organization which will send them to Africa.

Please don't donate books with out of date information to book charities. They have to spend so much money on disposing of unsuitable material, which would be better spent on buying new materials that better suit local conditions.

Libraries are reluctant to take donations like this because of the cost of identifying, organising, cataloguing, and disposing of the excess material. Your best bets are either a new school that is looking for a foundation collection or a school with similar existing collection of papers and materials.

That said, I have been in this situation. When my father in law died, he left behind an enormous amount of materials in adult education and marketing and materials used for his PhD. Many of the books were classics - but again, not items that a library would want (and being a librarian, I knew there would be no library in the country that would take them). It was difficult, but in the end my husband took a few of the best items and disposed of the rest. It is hard to get past the emotion, especially when looking at handwritten notes etc, but in time the burden has to be lifted.
posted by wingless_angel at 3:53 AM on May 3 [1 favorite]

"Any litigation involved has been concluded at least seven years ago, well past state or federal obligations to preserve or destroy notes and evidence."

However, he may have had court ordered or contractual requirements for confidentiality of the contents of his papers which may not have ended upon his death. Determining if or what materials carry this burden would be well nigh impossible until such a time as someone made use of them and then some other person or firm became litigiously displeased. IANAL, but I think this prospect would give any archival researcher pause. I'm pretty sure that responding to - for example - Excelon Co. legal staff could be quite expensive.

And what wingless_angel said.
posted by fydfyd at 5:11 AM on May 3

Engineering libraries would have no interest in out of date material (they have a different purpose), but rare book libraries and archives are a different matter. I'm doing part-time work at a rare-book library, and we've been processing a lot of 20th century material recently: serials, 'zines, children's books - some of it purchased, but other collections donated.

So, I would second the recommendation above to contact universities with History of Science departments, and also contact large rare books libraries. There may be some hesitation because funding cuts mean that libraries don't have as much staff to process material; my library is using salaried staff for a major bar-coding project because they don't have enough money to hire students (and they are relatively well-to-do). The more details you can provide on the collection, the better - titles of books, the nature of the manuscript material, etc - so that they can judge how it fits into their current collection (what overlap, etc).

Some rare book libraries also have manuscript collections, like the Beinecke Library at Yale.
posted by jb at 7:08 AM on May 3

Before you decide on a landfill, think about used book stores (http://www.blackoakbooks.com/). When in grad school, I would routinely troll the used book stores to find old texts - it was clear they got full collections from single individuals. I always assumed this was from donations from professors who passed away.

You could probably try to sell the books, but if it's books mixed with papers you might be better off just getting them to take everything off your hands no charge...
posted by NoDef at 7:53 AM on May 3

Could the Student Chapter of the Society Of American Archivists at the University of Michigan lend a hand, if not to just weed out the good stuff from the fodder?
posted by bhance at 8:51 AM on May 3

Here is a hyper-longshot. Maybe there is a scholar/author who would be interested in the collection in toto or a significant subset as input to research. (Failure analysis is certainly an interesting subject, at least to me, since typically there are both technical and human factors issues.) With that in mind, you could try to make it visible wherever possible on the web; your posting here is an obvious start.

The legal issues per wingless_angel would concern me also. Do you need a industrial level shredding service, at least for the papers? Shouldn't be too expensive.

P.S. I am faced with a similar problem, though on a much smaller scale, and only a couple hundred miles away; the landfill looks like the probable outcome in my case. Good luck.
posted by Kevin S at 9:01 AM on May 3

> Geography, limited funds and time make it impossible for me to itemize

Does this preclude hiring a local student to go through it for you? If you have an inventory, you might be able to find organizations or archives that would take certain parts of the collection, especially newsworthy stuff like Three Mile Island and the Holland Tunnel documents. In other words, what bhance just said.
posted by Quietgal at 9:01 AM on May 3

You don't want engineering schools, but archives. If there is some value in his papers, they'll take them, and they'll process them--actually, they'd prefer you didn't go mucking through them first.

I'm sure there are special collections libraries which focus on engineering. They'll only want the collection if it's somehow unusual or if your favorite was important in the field.

But here's something to remember: the same reason you don't want this stuff is the same reason most libraries don't--it takes up a lot of space and may be of limited interest.
posted by bluedaisy at 10:35 AM on May 3

I hate to tell you this, but there were a lot of scholars keeping these collections and every department and every library is already overloaded with old books and journals. They take up a lot of space and are of limited interest.

Plus, it is hard enough keeping up with new scholarship to have time to go into the old. And everyone is so limited on space that digitization is key.

I'd put something up on Craig's List locally to see if anyone is interested. I'd also email some archives and/or history of science scholars. I wouldn't expect too much though.
posted by k8t at 12:13 PM on May 3

I just want to second googly's suggestion of contacting scholars, scholarly associations, and listservs in history of science, history and philosophy of science and STS (which can either mean "Science, Technology, and Society" or "Science and Technology Studies"). 4s, the Society for Social Studies of Science, might also be able to give you some advice or allow you to post a message to their members.

I could easily imagine a scholar interested in tracing a history of engineering failure through your father's documents--although that doesn't mean that any such scholar exists. You have to check the with relevant listservs etc for that. I think it's more likely that any individual scholar would only be interested in documents pertaining to the particular cases that interest them (especially well-known cases like Three Mile Island), but there might well be centers out there that would appreciate a particularly extensive archive like your father's.
posted by col_pogo at 12:19 PM on May 3

By the way, a major archive of papers relating to the Three Mile Island incident is housed at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. It might be worth contacting the archives there to see if they have any suggestions.
posted by arco at 3:11 PM on May 3

Thank you very much to all who have responded. I've done a broadcast letter to a number of different universities' archives and collections management librarians, and also sweetened the deal by volunteering to donate the cash I would otherwise spend for disposal. If successful, I'll post the results for others who might find themselves in this situation.
posted by patience_limited at 3:44 PM on May 3

Offering a donation is an inspired idea. Good luck.
posted by bluedaisy at 3:15 AM on May 4

You could also try getting them mass-scanned at a service like Pixily and toss everything online, as a sort of tribute/archive.
posted by Poleris at 3:14 PM on May 21