##M:[more]##Floods and water damage are a fact of life for all archives — national, state, and university — as well as the family home. The nor’easter last week put an unprecedented 20 inches of water in the David Sarnoff Library’s storage areas. Since we have never had more than 5 inches before, and never anticipated more than 12, some 600 cubic feet of lab notebooks, technical reports, manuals, and manuscript collections are soaked. These include not only notebooks and reports from RCA’s Princeton Labs, but unique collections of notebooks, reports, and manuals from the RCA Picture Tube and Broadcast divisions; RCA Camden, Moorestown, Somerville, East Windsor, Burlington MA, Van Nuys CA; and RCA Communications in Japan.
These unique collections represent the patrimony of RCA’s creativity in the research, development, engineering, and production of electronic technologies used around the world. We saved these files in the first place because of their importance in documenting the birth of modern communications, from broadcast microphones to color TV picture tubes, from satellite communications to the microchips that surround us in cars, computers, and cell phones.
While our host, Sarnoff Corporation, has pumped out the water, time is of the essence to recover these unique collections through freeze-drying before mold sets in and pages bind together. Our contractor, Document Reprocessors, began work April 18, with its crew repacking the collections, tracking them, and transporting the frozen boxes to its facility in Rochester, NY. There its staff will sublimate the ice and as importantly, flatten the dried documents through its patented process.
Our liability insurance does not cover flooding. Document Reprocessors has estimated a cost of $100 per cubic foot. They have very kindly provided us a 50 percent professional discount on the freeze-drying and will subtract another 25 percent of that cost if we can pay the invoice when they are ready to return the collections — in three to four weeks’ time.
Sarnoff Corporation will help offset this unexpected cost, and members of David Sarnoff’s family have sent contributions. But if you or a family member once worked for RCA, if you work even now in the electronics or communications industries, or if you believe in preserving America’s legacy to the world, we need your donations as well.
Please join hundreds of others in rescuing and restoring this world heritage. You can adopt reports ($25), cartons ($100), or cabinets ($1,”000) through a tax-deductible check to the David Sarnoff Library or a Paypal donation (https://www.paypal.com/, to donations@davidsarnoff.org ). In doing so, you will help not only preserve what must be preserved, but enable us to move forward with the development of our field trip program that will encourage the next generation to follow in the creative footsteps of David Sarnoff and RCA’s thousands of employees.
Alexander Magoun, Ph.D.
Executive Director
