Americans Help Soviets Bind Wounds After Library Fire

Sally Buchanan can tell librarians exactly how to salvage millions of scorched and soggy books.

But her advice varies depending on whether the books are in Los Angeles or Leningrad.

Buchanan, an expert in library disaster management, recently returned from facing her biggest professional challenge. She and two colleagues were invited to advise Soviet officials after the largest and most destructive library fire in history raced through the Soviet Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad. The Feb. 14 blaze damaged more than 3 million books and destroyed 400,000 others.

Prepared by Disaster

Luckily for the Soviets, the team had been well prepared for their assignment by the 1986 fire that destroyed the Los Angeles Central Library. They had helped direct cleanup and restoration efforts after that fire, which until the Leningrad blaze was considered the worst in history, with 700,000 books damaged and 400,000 destroyed.

“We just took all those techniques developed in Los Angeles to Russia,” Buchanan, 46, said in an interview at her home here.

But Buchanan and her colleagues, book conservators Peter Waters, 57, of the Library of Congress and Don Etherington, 53, of Information Conservation Inc. of Greensboro, S.C., found they had to apply some of their techniques differently in the Soviet Union. Differences in available technologies as well as cultural differences meant the three could not give the Soviets the same advice they gave the Los Angeles library staff.

The Leningrad fire occurred in an 80-year-old section of the library founded by Peter the Great in 1714. The building where the fire broke out, which was not destroyed, housed 12 million of the library’s 17.5-million-volume scientific collection. Many of the books that burned were irreplaceable works dating from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Parts of the library have reopened, Buchanan said, and no cause for the blaze has yet been established.

In the Los Angeles fire, the three were flown in just two days after the fire broke out. In Leningrad, by contrast, they arrived six weeks after the fire. Many of the initial decisions about what to do with the damaged books had already been made.

“They had frozen 250,000 of the wet books at fish-freezing plants around Leningrad,” said Buchanan, whose specialty is the overall management of library disasters. “But then they ran out of freezer space and still had 600,000 wet books they needed to air-dry.”

(Library experts recommend freezing wet books to prevent the growth of mold and mildew.)

A few days after the fire, Buchanan said, officials had broadcast an appeal to the residents of Leningrad to visit the library, pick up several books, take them home and dry them out. By the end of Buchanan’s visit, she said, thousands of people had dried and returned all of the books, many of which were rare and valuable.

“It’s an amazing story,” Etherington said in a telephone interview. “They revere the library and books much more than we do. They’re not so tied to TV.”

After the Los Angeles fire, McDonnell Douglas allowed the library to use its space simulation chamber to quickly dry 20,000 of the water-damaged books. Such a chamber was not available in Leningrad, Buchanan said, but she hopes to enlist the aid of U.S. engineers to transfer vacuum freeze-drying technology to the Soviet Union. When books are freeze-dried, they are less likely to be permanently distorted by the water they have absorbed.

Options Discussed

The team spent four days in Leningrad with the library staff, assessing the damage and discussing possible options for reassembling the collection. Buchanan said she introduced library officials to the concept of “phased preservation,” in which damaged books are gradually replaced or put on microfilm rather than individually restored.

But the Soviets were more interested in restoring as many of the soggy, charred books as possible. “To spend the time physically repairing charred fragments is kind of crazy,” Etherington said. “But they seemed to really want to treat the materials.”

Etherington said he recommended they consider coating the damaged books with Parylene, a new protective substance developed by Union Carbide. The group also suggested that the Library of Congress or the International Federation of Library Assns. coordinate an international effort to replace the 400,000 volumes destroyed in the fire. Most of those books were part of the library’s foreign language collection.

Los Angeles Central Library Director Betty Gay sent Buchanan several “Save the Books” pins from the library’s successful fund-raising campaign to give to Leningrad library officials. They wore them around the city, Buchanan said, but exhibited little enthusiasm for mounting a similar capitalistic campaign. “That went over pretty flat,” Etherington said.

Buchanan works part time at the University of Pittsburgh and part time as an independent consultant here. She, Waters and Etherington have helped libraries around the world recover from fires, floods, earthquakes and tornadoes.

They were invited to Leningrad by the year-old International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity.

Martha Snodgrass, a staff assistant at the foundation’s U.S. office in Cambridge, Mass., said the privately funded organization exists to promote international cooperation on global problems. Yevgenii Velikhove, one of the vice chairmen of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, sits on the foundation’s executive committee, as does Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum.

Wheels Set Into Motion

At a foundation meeting in Moscow early in March, Velikhove broached the idea of inviting a team of Western library disaster experts to Leningrad, Snodgrass said. Hammer contacted Los Angeles officials, who recommended Buchanan, Waters and Etherington. They were the only foreign library experts invited.

The group’s report to the foundation will be completed by the end of this month, Etherington said. It will recommend ways that the foundation might support additional efforts to salvage the library. But the decision to accept those efforts will rest with the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

“It’s pretty exciting for people in our field,” Etherington said. “It’s the first time any American conservator has been involved in working with their Russian counterparts.”