Latin America Lacks Funds to Preserve Books : Story of Libraries a Sad Chapter in Fiscal Crisis

In her small laboratory, Maritza Vela Garzon gently opened a 400-year-old book as if it were a jewel case.

The red-and-black Gothic type revealed a breathtaking antiquity--and a tragic carelessness: There are thumb-sized holes in the first few pages.

“Someone put Scotch tape on these pages,” she said. “They thought they were doing the right thing, keeping a tear from worsening.”

The glue from the tape eventually ate through the old paper.

Vela Garzon, the Colombian National Library’s only staff expert in book preservation and restoration, hopes to repair the damage. It’s a painstaking, frustrating task.

15th-Century Volume

Among the library’s 28,000 old and rare books are entire Jesuit libraries seized in the late 1700s by the Spaniards. The oldest volume was produced in 1480. Many were written or illustrated by hand.

They beg for attention.

“It’s not a question of negligence,” the library’s director, Ruben Sierra, explained in an interview. “It’s simply a lack of money.”

The same refrain can be heard across financially strapped Latin America, where governments struggling with big foreign debts, grinding poverty and other urgent economic and social problems have little time or money for cultural preservation.

Sierra said he has heard stories from state librarians of much worse situations in other countries. One national library’s shelves are full of cats, he said, because it’s the only affordable way they can deal with the rats.

Austerity Program

Indeed, compared to most neighboring countries, Colombia enjoys a thriving economy and a low inflation rate, running at about 25% a year. But its $20-billion debt is still burdensome, and a program of relative public austerity has been in effect for years.

“They promised us some money, but it didn’t come,” Sierra said. “There’s always something else that takes precedence. Last year, it was emergency flood aid for the coast. This year, who knows what it will be.”

Sierra said he expects to receive about 30 million pesos, the equivalent of about $80,000, to run the 900,000-volume library this year. It is less than half of what the library requested.

Nonetheless, he is hopeful the government will come up with an extra 200 million pesos (about $540,000) next year for creating a respectable conservation and restoration center.

Small Laboratory

Vela Garzon works alone in her small lab, crowded with equipment, much of it donated by the Organization of American States. She has one small chest for fumigating the several hundred old books infected with mold, a few dozen at a time.

“This is the first step. There is much left to do,” she said.

“For right now, we can only take care of the most valuable or those that most urgently need attention.”

The library was created in the 1770s, when Colombia was still a colony of Spain. Authorities needed a place to shelter thousands of leather-bound volumes confiscated from Jesuit colleges and missions when the Roman Catholic clerical order was expelled from the Spanish kingdom.

All the rare volumes have been catalogued; not so for the rest of the library. Boxes holding 40,000 books are piled high in the cellar. No one is sure when they arrived or exactly what they hold.

According to Sierra, a predecessor solved a similar problem in 1972 by simply selling 15,000 books as scrap to a local paper company.

“It was a barbarous act,” he said. But he added that some of the books were salvaged, including historically important records.