In the previous post, we finally were able to relocate all of the materials donated to the City Tech Science Fiction Collection during the pandemic into the Library’s Archives space. On Thursday, April 20, 2023, Prof. Jason Ellis was able to shelve the material thanks to the efforts of Prof. Wanett Clyde and the librarian staff to open 30 shelves for the additional material.

The first step involved cleaning each shelf of accumulated dust and letting it dry before shelving any material.

Then, each box was opened in turn and its contents shelved in the stacks. The primary objective was to get the materials out of the boxes and onto the shelves, because some of the boxes had been damaged during shipping and the materials were exposed and/or smashed together. With limited time and uncertainty about how much material there was of each type, a strategy was adopted to put like materials together: hard cover fiction, paperback fiction, and periodicals/fanzines/ephemera. Later, a photographic inventory will be made of each shelf and each item will be entered into the finding aid.

Thank you again to Charlie Seelig, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, City Tech Professor Lucas Bernard and his father Kenneth Bernard, the experimental playwright and English professor whose materials were donated, and Emeritus Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and former president of the Science Fiction Research Association David Mead!