Qatar - QNL employs technology to preserve centuries of Arab history

(MENAFN- The Peninsula) The Peninsula

Doha: Heritage preservation unites people, connects them to their past and helps them shape their future by sharing insights into previous generations' customs and traditions, economic situations, values and daily lives. Our past is the foundation of our present and a guide to a better life, making it critical to preserve and conserve heritage materials so that they are easily accessible to current and future generations. 

To that end, Qatar National Library's Preservation and Conservation (PAC) Center, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions' regional center for the preservation of documentary heritage in the Arab region and the Middle East, is at the forefront of preserving the past. This task can be particularly urgent in areas facing upheaval, as Maxim Nasra, book conservation specialist at the Library, explains.

“Not long ago, right after the 2020 Beirut port explosion, we realised we needed to contribute to the rebuilding of Lebanon's cultural capacity, which was badly damaged,” Nasra said.“The Library, in partnership with the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas, Unesco and others, is helping key cultural organisations and school libraries across Lebanon reconstruct their premises and restore their archives to ultimately preserve the country's cultural legacy and heritage for future generations.”

The first priority for the team at the Library is to understand the risks that need to be navigated and the underlying causes of those risks. Heritage collections are inherently susceptible to deterioration from many natural and external causes. The Library's heritage collections contain a wide range of organic materials, including paper, cloth, animal skins and adhesives. Experts face challenges at both practical and theoretical levels. 

While measures can be taken to delay this deterioration, experts need to act quickly to pre-empt the risks and take the required actions to preserve materials. Each item in the collection needs to be analysed individually based on its composition and condition. If needed, a comprehensive scientific analysis needs to be conducted to study the chemical composition of the objects (paper, pigments, ink), as well as the quality of material available for conservation treatments. 

Explaining the challenges that the preservation team at the Library usually faces, Nasra said:“When working on manuscripts, it often happens that we have to deal with inks and pigments that are not well adhered to the support. This might be a result of a degradation process or because of their composition. 

“We faced this before with a manuscript with red ink, so we conducted analysis to help identify the cause. The results showed that the root cause was the binder used in the process of making the ink; it was not strong enough to keep the pigment on the paper. Based on this, we treated all the text written in red ink in order to prevent any future degradation. 

“Environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, light, atmosphere and pollutants can all cause degradation. The chemical, mechanical and biological nature of these reactions may vary from material to material. The parchments collection, in particular, requires strong control of its environmental conditions, given the high sensitivity of the structure of the material itself,” Nasra added.

The preservation and conservation processes are sometimes tedious, and the timeframe for each item depends on its individual condition. For instance, manuscripts can take a few days to several months, based on their deterioration levels. 

“Among the most challenging treatments processed in our lab was the conservation of an archival document that was very brittle, with a little bit of ink corrosion. The document was kept in a frame, so we could take a photo of the item and use it as a guideline for putting together all the fragments. When the item was taken out of the frame, the situation got worse and the fragments increased, making it even more challenging. This conservation treatment took around three weeks for a document that was a little bit smaller than an A3 paper 929.7 centimeters x 42 centimeters,” said Nasra.

Also, the pictorial layers in photographs are extremely sensitive; hence, preventive conservation methods such as controlling the environmental conditions and properly packing them with acid-free materials are usually part of the standard processes.

While the pandemic was not ideal for preservation work, PAC Center team members were able to adapt quickly and use technology to remotely navigate risks by controlling and monitoring environmental conditions in storage areas and exhibitions. They increased their efforts and developed an intensive digital preservation strategy as part of documentary heritage preservation. 

Notwithstanding the impact of the pandemic, the team follows a strict protocol of good housekeeping practices, security controls and measures to protect collections against fire, water and other hazards. A central part of their strategy was developing disaster preparedness and a response manual to describe potential risks—manmade or natural—to the buildings and collections, reviewing present precautions against these risks, and examining disaster preparedness and response plans. 

The Library regularly monitors air quality to identify the presence of dust, mold spores, bacteria and insect eggs, all of which threaten the objects in the collections. The team also organises online courses, workshops and conferences, and develops online content in the field of preservation and conservation and material science, in line with their digital preservation strategy. Among those initiatives is a video by the PAC Center on how to dry out wet books and deal with water damages, which has been widely viewed. 

The Analytics Lab at the Library plays an instrumental role in preservation. The lab's state-of-the-art equipment uses non-destructive and non-invasive analysis techniques to enable the team to analyse information about each item's material composition. Some of the advanced technologies used in the lab include Raman spectroscopy, which enables the identification of inorganic and organic pigments, and the fibre optic reflectance spectrometer, to identify pigments and dyes of polychrome surfaces. 

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