As I sat at lunch on the Florida International University campus a few months ago with Nancy Kirkpatrick, the new FIU Dean of Libraries, she asked what may seem like an odd question from the leader of an academic library:

"Do you have any experience working with rum bottles?"

Although most of my experience with rum bottles comes from activities outside of working hours, I do have vast experience packaging archives (more about that in my next blog!), so I was immediately intrigued by her question. As it turns out, the FIU Special Collections team had been gifted an extensive collection of rum bottles from around the world by a former professor that were to be used as an archival research resource on campus. There were two outstanding issues, however, they needed to solve: 

1. How to transport these glass bottles safely from the donor’s house to the FIU campus?
2. And how to make rum bottles - many of which still contained spirits - accessible to researchers?

To meet FIU’s needs on a compressed timeline, we put together an Iron Mountain team with a deep understanding of the special handling requirements regarding relocating and imaging archival materials. That being said, rum bottles are not “traditional archival materials.” Thus we needed to create a customized solution, designed around the unique nature of these materials, including nonstandard boxes and specialty-built pallets for safely packing and transporting the bottles. We also needed a customized inventory software for inventory and metadata capture. And finally, we needed to set up our own photography station at FIU for 360° imaging of the bottles. Over three days at the donor’s house, and an additional two weeks at FIU, our team successfully barcoded, packed, transported, and imaged over 400 rum bottles.