The Archive is a mess, in spite of Galade's best efforts. There's too much going on to protect it from chaos -- crates of records coming in every week from all over the planet, all of them on various technologies and in a range of conditions, from crumbling paper to outdated infodisc to pristine holos. Some of it is city records, some of it is personal correspondence. A very nice woman from Manassah has been sending him every newsreel article about Aloth and Anna Lloyd and they're all logged on a console that no one has had time to go through yet.
The trouble is that the scale of the project is greater than the number of people working on it. The person who does interviews is excellent at it, but they're one person, and taking an oral history of the Dragon Wars involves coordinating the four or five living sources, all over ninety, getting them to stay on track and give their accounts -- each source takes weeks to interview and then all the raw footage has to be transcribed, the interview content has to be cross-checked to see what can be confirmed, filed into the right databases. The librarian is doing her best, but she came from a public library and transitioning to an academic project is new covering new ground. Galade is head of preservation (a somewhat meaningless title for a staff of seven people who all have their own specialities) and the sheer quantity of paper that has to be babied is immense.
So no one greets Melian when he arrives because everyone is absorbed in their own frantic projects, busy trying to keep their heads above water. Instead, he's left to wander cautiously until he finds someone.
Meanwhile Galade is in an office towards the front. He's wearing a facemask and gloves so he doesn't breathe on or contaminate the pages of the project he's been working on. It's a sheaf of children's drawings of Arthur LeGuin and Gwenore Lenard from the Queen's Coronation; a goat farmer found them, among many other documents, in the ruin of a school building in Bredigan after the Fall and thanks to Galade's constant outreach efforts thought to send them to the Archive. The time in the dry desert air has made the pages brittle and the colors faded, but the students have illustrated a variety of beaming Arthurs and tall, golden-haired Gwenores. One picture has Gwenore's tiara enormous, with outsize red blobs for the garnets. In one, the king and queen are holding hands; in another Gwenore has her spaceship behind her, improbably small enough to fit into the council chamber at the Hall. A fourth has big speech bubbles for Arthur that say I love you so much. Thank you for being the Queen. Everyone will love you too!
Galade sprays each page with a small aerosol can of stabilizer, a mixture of a deacidification agent to prevent deterioration and a polyfilm that coats and strengthens the paper. It dries rapidly, and once the pages are stabilized he can scan them with his handheld and upload the pictures to one of the consoles; then it's safe to box and store the originals. He's deeply absorbed in the work.