By Anna Waugh

Tulane UniversityTalk about overdue library books. After a two and a half year wait, 210,000 library books will be returned to the Howard Tilton Memorial Library, the main library at this New Orleans school. The items were removed and restored after Hurricane Katrina laid havoc on the collection. On March 14, the Tulane Libraries Recovery Center ceremoniously delivered ten books to the library and returned them on a “golden” book cart to the third floor shelving area.

According to an April 2 press release by the university, Hurricane Katrina flooded the football field sized basement of Tulane’s main undergraduate and graduate library with eight feet of water destroying much of the collection. The basement carried government documents, newspapers, a music collection and microforms.

In addition to the restored items, another 100,000 donated items will be integrated into the current collection.

When Katrina hit in August and power was shut off to the library, the temperatures rose to dangerous levels, and toxic mold began to spread. A university wide emergency plan was put into action almost immediately, reported a library blog, and within hours water was pumped out of the library and recovery began.

“Every member of the Recovery Center team demonstrates to us on a daily basis that they have the energy, dedication, and zeal to be a part of Tulane’s and New Orleans’s recovery efforts. We are proud to be a part of this historic endeavor,” said the Recovery Center Project Manager Del Oehms Hamilton in a press release.

City University of New York

Short and sweet, it ain’t. Since 1972, the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, or NCSCBHEP for short, has researched and published analyses about labor-management relations. But their long name has continually given them problems over the years, and now The National Center, which is housed at Hunter College (a part of CUNY), is looking for a new name.

“People always ask us when we’re going to do something about our name,” said Richard Boris, executive director of the Center. “The board has agreed that it’s just something that we have to do.”

The name and the acronym will be changed to something shorter, and less confusing.

There’s no word yet on whether their annual publication, which tracks all faculty and graduate student employees who are currently members of union organizations in the U.S, will get a new name. The 2006 Directory of Faculty Contracts and Bargaining Agents in Institutions of Higher Education reported that 375,000 faculty and GSE’s had union representation as of January 2006.