The Prague Library Floods of 2002: Crisis and Experimentation

Abstract

In August 2002 a massive flood struck the Czech capital city of Prague, inundating the collections of the National Library of the Czech Republic and the Prague Municipal Library. The librarians from these institu tions and others in the Czech Republic had to respond quickly during a natural disaster. Despite the chaos and lack of preparation, Czech librar ians and archivists were able to send a significant percentage of their flooded collections to be frozen, thus staving off immediate destruction of these historic collections by water or mold. Once the materials were frozen, librarians had to decide the best way to thaw and disinfect the items so that these materials could be used again. Influenced partly by cost, Czech librarians chose an experimental method over standard methods such as vacuum packing or vacuum freeze drying to treat the bulk of the frozen library materials. This essay traces the preservation decisions that librarians at two institutions, the National Library and the Prague Municipal Library, made during and after the flood to save their unique and historical collections. Library preservation technology has greatly advanced since the devas tating flood in Florence, Italy, in 1966 that shaped library preservation as a discipline. Yet library flood damage on the scale of Florence and Prague has been rare. The Prague flood presented an opportunity to examine large-scale preservation technology in 2002. While restoration techniques and technology for water-damaged materials were advanced and effective for small, in-building floods, in 2002 Czech librarians had few viable options and faced a dilemma when a large body of items was damaged after the calamitous and nationwide flood.