Caroline Bendix & Athanasios Velios: Storing library collections: A workflow for packing and tracking items in the library of the St. Catherine's Monastery.

This paper is an account of the packing of the St. Catherine's library in Sinai, Egypt in preparation for major building work at the Monastery. With the library collection including 3,381 manuscripts, thousands of printed books and a large archive, our main concern was the security of the items, some of which have not been catalogued. Another important factor during the work was the condition of the existing building and the availability of space while storing the items, particularly because items from the collection may need to be retrieved during the building works. In addition, many of the manuscripts, in particular, are fragile or vulnerable to handling and packing techniques had to be varied to reflect this.

We begin the paper by giving an overview of the decision-making process during the planning of the project. This includes the initial calculations for volume and weight of the books and the time needed for packing each collection. We explain the difficulties of sourcing appropriate packing material in Sinai and the final selection of storage crates.

We continue by describing a system for tracking and retrieving each item based on barcodes and a wireless local network. We include the description of equipment and software used, as well as the current online retrieval system in use during the building works.

We outline and describe the workflow for packing individual items in stages: a) tracking, b) cleaning, c) assessing for certain conditions, d) wrapping and e) crating. We explain how these stages are interlinked and how they were optimised during the process.

We conclude with discussion on the efficiency of the workflow and some statistical figures on performance. Finally, we briefly describe the planned process for returning the items in the new library after the building work is complete.