Two years and thousands of hours of hard work later the staff members of the Jagger Library still have thousands of boxes of recovered material to work through following the devastating blaze of 2021.
On Sunday 18 April that year a runaway wildfire ripped through the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) upper and middle campus. While several buildings were damaged, including the HW Pearson Building that forms part of the Department of Biological Science, it was the loss of the nearly 200-year-old Jagger Reading Room that shocked the world.
READ | Salvage of fire-damaged Special Collections at Jagger Library continues two years after UCT blaze
First gutting its roof, the fire quickly spread to the galleries, adjacent stores and offices, leaving destruction in its wake. Chief among the losses was the African Studies collection, started in 1953, as well as portions of many other collections: journals, ephemera, manuscripts, film and video, and maps and rare antiquarian books.
Last week UCT shared that the architect’s project brief for UCT Libraries – master planning of the network of libraries incorporating the post-fire rehabilitation, refurbishment, upgrade and integration of the JW Jagger Library Reading Room; and the reconceptualisation of the new Special Collections Archives – had been signed off.
Interim Vice-Chancellor Emeritus Professor Daya Reddy said the next step was the appointment of an architect in accordance with the UCT Properties & Services processes.
“The user group that will guide and advise the master planning process has been finalised and relevant individuals identified for participation,” he said.
“Consideration of how and where to store a new working archive in future is an important factor in designing and rebuilding the Jagger Library.”
A series of workshops held over the past two years “to consider how the university might ‘reimagine’ the space as a research library with a focus on African history, identity and creative expression” as well as the library’s status as a heritage building will inform the process, the media statement said. While all of this “reimagining” goes on, Michal Singer, Principal Archivist at Special Collections, UCT Libraries, and her team will continue sifting through the remainder of 13 000 crates of material carefully salvaged and removed from the library.
Now boxed, the material is being kept at interim premises in Mowbray. The layout includes workspaces, a conservation unit, collections infrastructure and storage.
Singer says in the past two years they have been able to go through at least 2 000 boxes, catalogue the contents and bring it back into circulation.
“It’s going to take us several years to work through everything and I think the scale of it is unprecedented in our field in South Africa,” she says.
While the loss has been described as incalculable Singer says it was a relief to discover that not all had been lost.
“We originally thought we had lost everything. I mean, we couldn’t access the building for a couple of days after the fire. So there was this sense of dread.”
However, there were two saving graces – a ramp and a solid oak door. “There used to be a ramp that led down from the Reading Room to the basement. Because the ramp had nothing in it to burn, the fire just seems to have stopped there, and that’s how we saved the basement.”
The material held in Reserve Shelving, an area that leads off the Reading Room, was also protected, thanks to a solid door that sealed it off from the fire.
“Researchers would sit in the Reading Room. They would email us whatever they needed and we would get the material from the basement or off site and would keep it in Reserve Shelving. That door protected that area from the fire.”
Singer added even in the areas that got burnt a few shelves remained untouched.
While the fire did not reach the basement the enormous amount of water used to douse it did, causing severe flooding. Singer shared she was one of the first people to enter the basement.
“We went down this ramp, and I just stuck my leg in and the water came up to here,” she said, indicating her upper thigh. “It was hectic.”
The sodden and wet material was wrapped in plastic and put in a freezer. Singer said freeze drying was now being used to recover the material.
“Not everything, obviously, was damaged in the inferno or flooding,” she pointed out.
“The majority of the material just needs to be checked. In some cases the archival collections are in boxes and folios, and they can take up hundreds of boxes. So we are going through all the collections and seeing what’s missing, and whatever is missing we know got wet.”
