Pigeon droppings

First, My sympathy to you and to whoever discovered the mess. Any type
of animal droppings should be treated as a health hazard. (Why take
chances?)  My first step would be to talk with whoever is in charge of
health risks/risk management/hazardous substances on the Davis campus. I
would also require anyone handling these books to wear a particle mask
and gloves.

You don't say what kinds of books these are, so I'm going to assume that
they are part of your circulating collection.  Do you need to keep them
at all?  Could the bibliographer be persuaded to discard them?  (Maybe
if he/she got a good whiff of them...?) If you have to retain them, are
they bindable?  My preferred solution would be to remove as much of the
dreck as possible manually, remove and discard the covers, then send the
text blocks to the bindery.  (It would probably be advisable to warn the
bindery in advance of what they will find when they open the box.)  If
the text blocks are too brittle to bind, try having photocopy
replacements made.

As for the shelving where these books were stored when the birds did the
dirty deed, you should probably consider having the area vacuumed and
disinfected as you would after a mold outbreak.

                                  ***
                  Conservation DistList Instance 6:29
                Distributed: Thursday, November 26, 1992
                        Message Id: cdl-6-29-004
                                  ***