Maria Luisa Russo: “Mirabilia” and overfamiliarity: The problem of training and awareness in the care of rare books collections.

A good number of non-National Libraries, for example city libraries, University libraries, religious libraries, house manuscripts collections and/or early printed and rare books collections. In these libraries, the presence of librarians trained in the field of preventive conservation is still quite an exception, despite the value of these collections. The involvement of specific professionals such as preservation experts, if any, is normally required in the occasion of the launching of a specific project. It happens that the preservation expert is asked to take part in the planning stages of the project, to organize the overall layout of the preservation plan for special collections, and to give guidelines for its development. Otherwise, the specialist is also called when specific and relevant problems (=emergency) are detected in the collections. But when it comes to day-to-day preservation, different problems arise.

The aim of this presentation is to show the gap between preservation plan and day-to-day practices, and to stimulate a reflection on training and awareness in the curatorial context. Through a series of examples, collected during years of work as free-lance consultant for book preservation and conservation in many different libraries of the Piedmont region, I will demonstrate the most frequent problems posed by day-to-day management of manuscripts collections in different types of libraries (mostly city and university libraries).

It often happens that the librarians in charge of the continuity of the preservation plan do not have specific training in the field of preventive conservation and, in best cases, they try to transfer their practice adapted from the preservation of modern collections, to special collections. Lack of awareness of the specificities in the management of manuscript collections is the basis of many incorrect practices which can seriously jeopardize them: from book marking to access, sometimes a real strategy in ensuring the security and the preservation of books is lacking.

Field experience has shown that major problems somehow arise from two opposite attitudes:

On the one hand, there is the consideration of manuscripts as “mirabilia” in the library. This normally implies that they are too frequently put on display (with all related preservation problems); moreover, the extra-attention paid to the item sometimes does not give rise to an organic preservation plan, but to direct conservation treatment.

On the other hand, a sort of over-familiarity with manuscripts and rare books seems to have somehow dulled the “feel” of cultural heritage. From incautious handling to excessive trust in scholars who use the reading rooms, correct practices in rare books management are still inadequate, compared to the richness of the collections. I am not speaking exclusively of Medieval and Modern manuscripts: 19th-20th century manuscripts experience the same kind of problems, sometimes even worsened by the lack of “historical” distance and by the predominant interest for the texts.

The role of the preservation specialist, giving guidelines on specific projects and/or making spot-intervention in case of emergency, leaves the problem of day-to-day practices unsolved. In the effort of making correct preservation practices the standard in libraries, we find that simple but effective activities and precautions, such as the correct way of handling, dusting, are somehow perceived as “naive” and seem to be not thought-provoking enough; on the other hand, more complex practices, such as environmental control, are perceived as too complex, expensive and time-consuming activities compared to the other tasks of the librarian, which are certainly many. Lack of funding, a common problem, generally provide the final discouragement of good practices.

The paper will show these problems through real and sometimes “amusing” examples, aiming to stimulate a reflection on the training of librarians and on the commitment of public institutions in the future of these collections.