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Howard-Tilton Memorial Library is the university library on the uptown campus of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. A member of the Association of Research Libraries, the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library is ranked among the top 120 research libraries in North America and is a significant educational and cultural resource in the community. [1] During Hurricane Katrina, the Library suffered extensive damage to its collections and its buildings.
The Howard-Tilton Memorial Library was founded in 1938, when the collections of three pre-existing, smaller libraries were merged. [1] The most significant of these early library collections was that of the F.W. Tilton Memorial Library, dedicated in 1902 in honor of New Orleans businessman and philanthropist Frederick William Tilton. The Howard Memorial Library, dating to the 19th century, was a private collection of manuscripts. The merged library was first located in Jones Hall before moving to its current, five-story building in 1968. [2]
In addition to its general collections, the Library also is home to many special collections. The library houses the Louisiana Research Collections, the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive, the Southeastern Architectural Archive, and University Archives. In addition, the Latin American Library at the Library contains containing rare books, manuscripts, maps, images, and rubbings of Mayan stelae, as well as a large circulating collection. [3]
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005, the 40,000 square foot Library basement was flooded with more than eight feet of water. Four feet of water filled the basement of the library annex in Jones Hall. These areas housed the library's special collections, the Maxwell Music Library, and a very large collection of government documents. More than 700,000 print volumes and recordings, 700,000 manuscript folders and archival items, and 1.5 million individual pieces of microform were submerged.
Due to serious flooding and damage to nearby neighborhoods, the library was inaccessible to reconnaissance teams for several days. In that time, the standing water in the basement, combined with the lack of electricity (and, thus, lack of temperature control and air circulation), led to high humidity and temperature and thus the development of mold in the library at large. The disaster management company BELFOR was called to the scene as quickly as possible to begin recovery work. A temporary air circulation system run by generators was installed just 10 days after the storm and within a month, all of the water had been pumped out of the basement.
The damage from the flooding was significant. Basement walls were coated in slime and muck. Furniture and shelving had floated to the corners of the space, dislodging the materials that they once had housed, and subjecting them to submersion. The Maxwell Music Library had held more than 43,000 titles including books, scores, journals, and many rare and historic sound recordings on CD and LP. More than 70 percent of the printed books and scores were salvaged for restoration, but no recordings could be saved. The Government Documents Archive, which had held over 500,000 volumes, lost 90% of its collection. Nearly all of the salvaged government documents were trapped in storage-unit containers that had to be ripped apart to access the saturated material inside.
A very large Microforms area on the north side of the basement had held more than 30,000 titles of facsimile collections of rare or scholarly material and newspaper archives. Less than five percent of these materials could be salvaged because of the damage that lengthy immersion in dirty water can do to microforms, especially in formats such as fiche or microcard. None of the materials from the original 19th-century Howard Collection could be salvaged, due to structural wreckage and especially dangerous conditions in that area of the library. [4]
More than 300,000 important print volumes, 18,000 reels of microfilm, and 629,711 archival items were salvaged and restored. Tulane University established the Libraries Recovery Center in 2008 to sort the restored items, check them against the library's historic catalogue, create an inventory of materials unaccounted for, and return the materials to the library's collections. In 2013, this task was still ongoing. [5]
The Library reopened in spring 2006 for the start of the first post-Katrina semester. At that point, a battery of temporary HVAC units were being used to combat mold and humidity by distributing air throughout each floor by long semi-inflated tubes hung from the ceilings and attached through the windows along the back of the building to eight galvanized metal towers. In August 2013, plans were announced to replace these climate control systems with a more permanent solution, as well as to add a 5th and 6th floor to the library. The completion date is scheduled for Fall 2015. [6] The basement of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library remains gutted and empty, as does the basement level in Jones Hall.
New Orleans is a consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of Louisiana. With a population of 383,997 according to the 2020 U.S. census, it is the most populous city in Louisiana, third most populous city in the Deep South, and the twelfth-most populous city in the southeastern United States. Serving as a major port, New Orleans is considered an economic and commercial hub for the broader Gulf Coast region of the United States. New Orleans is also a region of French Louisiana, along with the Cajun Country.
Tulane University, officially the Tulane University of Louisiana, is a private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded as the Medical College of Louisiana in 1834 by seven young medical doctors, it was turned into a comprehensive public university as the University of Louisiana by the state legislature in 1847. The institution became private under the endowments of Paul Tulane and Josephine Louise Newcomb in 1884 and 1887. The Tulane University Law School and Tulane University Medical School are, respectively, the 12th oldest law school and 15th oldest medical school in the United States.
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The article covers the Hurricane Katrina effects by region, within the United States and Canada. The effects of Hurricane Katrina, in late August 2005, were catastrophic and widespread. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, leaving at least 1,836 people dead, and a further 135 missing. The storm was large and had an effect on several different areas of North America.
The reconstruction of New Orleans refers to the rebuilding process endured by the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the city on August 29, 2005. The storm caused levees to fail, releasing tens of billions of gallons of water. The levee failure contributed to extensive flooding in the New Orleans area and surrounding parishes. About 80% of all structures in Orleans Parish sustained water damage. Over 204,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, and more than 800,000 citizens displaced—the greatest displacement in the United States since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Wind damage was less severe than predicted. The damage that took place that needed to be repaired cost about $125 billion.
This article contains a historical timeline of the events of Hurricane Katrina' on August 23–30, 2005 and its aftermath.
The New Orleans Public Library (NOPL) is the public library service of the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, United States.
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Charity Hospital was one of two teaching hospitals which were part of the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans (MCLNO), the other being University Hospital. Three weeks after the events of Hurricane Katrina, then-Governor Kathleen Blanco said that Charity Hospital would not reopen as a functioning hospital. The Louisiana State University System, which owns the building, stated that it had no plans to reopen the hospital in its original location. It chose to incorporate Charity Hospital into the city's new medical center in the lower Mid-City neighborhood. The new hospital completed in August 2015 was named University Medical Center New Orleans.
The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC) is a museum, research center, and publisher dedicated to the study and preservation of the history and culture of New Orleans and the Gulf South region of the United States. It is located in New Orleans' French Quarter. The institution was established in 1966 by General and Mrs. L. Kemper Williams to keep their collection of Louisiana materials intact and available for research and exhibition to the public.
As a result of Hurricane Katrina and its effects on New Orleans, Tulane University was closed for the second time in its history—the first being during the American Civil War. The university closed for four months during Katrina, as compared to four years during the Civil War.
John M. Barry is an American author and historian who has written books on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the influenza pandemic of 1918, and the development of the modern form of the ideas of separation of church and state and individual liberty. He is a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and Distinguished Scholar at Tulane's Bywater Institute.
Scott S. Cowen is president emeritus of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he was also Seymour S. Goodman Memorial Professor in the A.B. Freeman School of Business and professor of economics in Tulane's School of Liberal Arts. He was interim president of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio from 2020 to 2021, and currently serves as Distinguished Presidential Visiting Professor of Leadership and Management at CWRU. He has written more than a hundred peer-reviewed journal articles and five books. His most recent book, Winnebagos on Wednesdays: How Visionary Leadership Can Transform Higher Education, was published by Princeton University Press in 2018. Cowen is the eponym of Tulane's Cowen Institute and chairs its board of advisors. Cowen served as Tulane's 14th president from July 1998 through June 2014.
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The Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz is an academic repository located at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. The archive specializes in Dixieland Jazz, gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, Creole songs, and related musical genres. Its collection includes oral histories, audio and video recordings, photos and other images, sheet music, personal papers, and teaching aids.
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