What do you do with soggy books?

In August 2002 Prague was devastated by flood. To find out just to what extent the library was affected I used the Swinburne search to find some information.
There was a very useful journal article from Libraries and the Cultural Record and a few newspaper articles. I tried following up one of the references from the journal article but the link was no longer any good. It did however lead me to the name of the Director of Collection Management and Preservation, Jiri Polisensky. A Google search on him led me to IFLANET where I found a message from the library director at the time, Vojtech Balik expressing thanks for the help provided to the National Library and other libraries and institutions nationwide. One such gift was 15,000 Euros from the Austrian National Library. At IFLANET I also found minutes of the governing board meetings from August 2002 that mentioned publicizing the Czech Republic's appeal for help.

The journal article covered a little of the National Library's disaster plan, how it failed, and then a timeline from when the heavy rains began, when the flood hit and the recovery process which was somewhat controversial (a technique used for drying wood) but ultimately effective to some degree. Freezing water-damaged materials is not uncommon but the contemporary state-of-the-art methods for drying were insufficient for the volume of material in this case due to the time that needed to be spent on each individual item.

On the library's website I found this information:

Damage Caused by Flood

In the National Library of the Czech Republic, the flood damaged or destroyed, above all, the infrastructure located in the underground of the Clementinum (rooms for storing material and furniture were inundated as well as a boiler room, a transformer, various underground offices etc.), which made the already bad technical condition of the Clementinum considerably worse.

Partial changes occurred in subsoil and minor static defects were detected in the underground, which caused e.g. defects in central heating piping in the eastern wing (State Technical Library) etc.

The total damage to the buildings amounts to ca CZK 18 million.

However, the greatest harm is, according to the National Library, in the fact that it will be necessary to change future prospects of adaptations of the Clementinum area within the framework of the preliminary investment programme of the development of the whole National Library of the Czech Republic for the forthcoming several decades (the prepared conception planned for principal reconstruction of the Clementinum buildings and for construction of large premises in the underground in order to provide a really modern building for the National Library, which would rank it among other modern European libraries in countries, we can compare with - e.g. Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Denmark etc.) (Hora 2003).

If you are interested in reading a STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF DRYING METHODS ON THE PHYSICAL CHEMICAL AND MICROBIOLOGICAL PROPERTIES OF VARIOUS KINDS OF PAPER please follow this link.

In an earlier post, searching for videos on Youtube I found a couple of videos on preservation techniques at the National Library of the Czech Republic, not directly related to the flood but relevant and interesting none-the-less.


Czech National Library Preservation - Repairing paper with cellulose, 2010

Czech National Library Central Depository - Preservation box cutter in action, 2010

This following video is Australian and shows how to dry out wet, dirty documents.

Salvage of Water Damaged Documents and Leaflets

And to end, this video. I'm sure it's intention wasn't to make me laugh, but it did. I don't think it's actually as old as it looks.


Document Reprocessors Disaster Recovery Services, 2010


References

TheAu Trowel 2010, Czech National Library Preservation - Repairing paper with cellulose, 13 June, viewed 4 September 2011, < http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HgwIGt2TP4w >.

The Au Trowel 2010, Czech National Library Central Depository - Preservation box cutter in action, 31 May, viewed 4 September 2011, < http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cyWjH8cy6fw >.

PreservationAust 2011, Salvage of water damaged documents and leaflets, 2 February, viewed 18 October 2011, < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0iauJVHyss&feature=related >.

DOCREP1 2010, Document Reprocessors Disaster Recovery Services, 1 April, viewed 18 October 2011, < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUvlfvt56Ao >.

Bacilikova, B 2003, Study of the effect of drying methods on the physical chemical and microbiological properties of various kinds of paper, National Library of the Czech Republic, viewed 18 October 2011, < http://www.nkp.cz/povodne/e_suseni.htm >.

Hora, M 2003, National Library of the Czech Republic - Damage Caused by flood, Its Remedy and Future Prospects, National Library of the Czech Republic, viewed 18 October 2011, < http://www.nkp.cz/_en/pages/page.php3?page=nkcr_Floods.htm >.

Ray, E 2006, 'The Prague library floods of 2002: crisis and experimentation', Libraries and the Cultural Record, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 381-391, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 17 October 2011.

Balik, V 2003, Message from the National Library of the Czech Republic, IFLANET, viewed 17 October 2011, < http://archive.ifla.org/III/misc/clementinum.html >.

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions 2002, Minutes of the Governing Board Meetings Held on the 16th and 24th August, 2002 in Glasgow, UK, IFLANET, viewed 17 October 2011, < http://archive.ifla.org/III/gb/gbm0802.htm >.