Friday, November 12, 2010 hours 11:30
Emergency plan for saving the collections from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence
 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence in collaboration with the Salone dell'Arte e del Restauro of Florence
Friday Novermber 12- from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Sala Giuseppe Rosi
The main interventions of restoration carried out in the Laboratory of restoration of the Central National Library of Florence from the 1966 flood to the collections maintenance plans.
The Central National Library of Florence was built next to the river Arno. It was damaged by the flood of the 4th November 1966 which submerged almost a million of volumes: newspapers, ph. D dissertations, magazines, contemporary works but above all: catalogues and six millions of inventory reports. The damages interested more than 100-000 volumes belonging to the historical collections as the large scale books Palatini and Magliabechiani and the precious fondo delle miscellanee. These extraordinary damages recall in Florence many experts and economic aids coming from many countries as: America, England, Germany, Austria, Australia, and many others. These great numbers, suddenly suggested the creation of a laboratory able to face and solve the library restoration problems. The Director, Emanuele Casamassima made the intuitive action to use the economic aids and the voluntaries and–the famous mud angels- to activate a great and important centre of restoration of Books and Paper artefacts. Few weeks after the flood many tons of volumes were saved from mud, dried and had a first cleaning operation. The Laboratory of restoration started its activity in the premises of the Centrale termica della stazione ferroviaria and later in the Central Library spaces. In the month of March 1997, it was moved in the area of the ex Convento di S. Ambrogio, properly restored and equipped by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage.
In the beginning the lab started its activities in a sort of industrial way. But it was the only solution to work and preserve the great number of volumes which needed a restoration process; anyway restorers had an innovative approach: each volume, was accompanied by a report which described, the damages but also the original structure of the artwork seen as the necessary preliminary starting point before the intervention of restoration. This new approach considered ended the old philological approach to book and paper restoration process.
Thanks to this system it was created a great and important archive made of materials, bindings and other old and not reused parts of the flooded artefacts. The personnel which was organised through a cooperative structure was later included in the state role with a reduction in its number which caused a reduction in the programmed interventions of restoration. An important mission was made by the centre in the field of restorer education which was carried out through a series of practical internships projects. In the years the interventions of restoration on the damaged volumes was changed in a preservation and conservation action often reserved to the library staff, from the problems arising out from artworks movimentation and storage actions to the drafting of a correct preliminary emergency plan to be use in case of other bad events. An emergency plan designed to face the four main emergency problems: prevention, reaction, first action, recovery. Its structure will be showed by means of a Power Point document, which includes suggestions and answers about the main problems of an emergency action as for example: the choice of the best model of intervention, the priority criteria, the time of artefacts evacuation, la composition of the teams, the first actions after the emergency.
Speakers: Gisella Guasti, Alessandro Sidoti
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