{"id":32785,"date":"2021-09-03T14:44:46","date_gmt":"2021-09-03T12:44:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uct.ac.za\/memory\/?p=32785"},"modified":"2021-09-21T09:07:10","modified_gmt":"2021-09-21T07:07:10","slug":"after-the-salvage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uct.ac.za\/memory\/2021\/09\/after-the-salvage\/","title":{"rendered":"After the Salvage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Mandy Noble, Principal Librarian for Published Collections, Special Collections, UCT Libraries<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Listen to Mandy Noble in conversation with Nancy Richards about the Jagger Fire and the Salvage on the bookspeoplestories podcast.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Much has been written by colleagues and journalists, in very moving pieces, of the momentous salvage project following the Table Mountain fire of April 18th<\/sup>  – a date that will be etched in the memories of all those who watched in horror as the beloved and historic Jagger Library went up in flames. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On that day, we all feared that everything housed in the Jagger Library was destroyed – but as the salvage process progressed over the next weeks, we were relieved to see that large parts of the collections had not been burnt. They were, at best, covered in soot and, at worst, severely water damaged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some unstable areas of the Jagger Library were inaccessible to Salvage volunteer teams for safety reasons. These were later removed by Isipani construction and salvaged by the Published Collections team<\/span>. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This blog is to pay tribute to all of the Special Collections staff, but particularly those in the Published Collections, who have embraced and led an enormous amount of recovery work since the last crate was removed from the Jagger Library and the last volunteer walked off. This work has taken place in various venues on and off UCT\u2019s Upper Campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Journals salvaged from the fire<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the Libraries’ Special Collections store at Meulenhof in Mowbray, a cohort of five library staff in the Published Collections team – assisted on and off, initially by volunteers and then staff members – painstakingly spent 10 days wiping soot off the thousands of soot-covered journals that miraculously survived the fire. Many of these journals are unique to UCT Libraries and cannot be found elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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