Emergency plan: immediate action

Evacuating documents

Evacuation to a healthy storage area should take place rapidly (mold begins to develop after 48 hours) but without haste so as to minimize any potential additional damage.

Documents should be divided into three categories: wet, damp, and dry. They are packaged differently depending on the category into which they fall.

Sheet-type documents and thin booklets (periodicals, newspapers, plays, librettos, etc.) are subject to a specific process.

Air drying

Damp documents

The recommended method for damp documents is open-air drying. This method may also be used for small volumes of wet documents or where there is a a shortage of equipment (e.g. there are no freezers available).

To protect collections from microbiological infestation, it is imperative that stable climatic conditions be maintained in the premises used for treatment.

This step is undertaken after documents have been evacuated and begins as soon as they are received.

Freezing/lyophilization

Wet documents

The safest way to quickly stabilize wet documents is freezing, which halts all physical distortion and microbiological development. Documents should be frozen as soon as possible.

Lyophilization is a process for removing water contained in a product using a simple physical principle known as sublimation, in which water is transitioned from the solid to the gas phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase. 

Lyophilization is carried out using a freeze-dryer.