Just back from 22nd Annual NARA Preservation Conference: The ABC’s of Modern Fire Suppression in Cultural Institutions. It was a really interesting one-day conference, and NARA does a great job of posting presentations online shortly afterwards (ahem!, PADG, AIC). Look here for a list of previous conferences, which include topics such as digitization / digital preservation / storage of digital surrogates in 2007 and environmental control in 2006. Among the best presentations this year were “Why Williamsburg Went Wet-Pipe” by Patricia Silence, Conservator of Exhibits at Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and “Low Oxygen Fire Suppression at the British Library” by Julian Taylor, Construction Project Sponsor at the British Library.

A couple presentations explored previous fires at cultural institutions and presented lessons learned from those fires.  Someone asked a great question: since a lot of cultural institutions don’t want these disasters in the news, how can we learn from their mistakes?  Other major / simple ideas that made it through my sleepy skull yesterday (getting up at 4:30a.m. and driving to D.C. for a one-day conference quickie is NOT a good idea):

  1. Collections wet by fire suppression systems and fire trucks / fire emergency responders trying to put out a fire are better than charred, wet collections and dead staff and patrons. Takeaway: We already knew “that which burns never returns.” And while having a fire suppression system in a cultural institution sounds like a duh, here in Alderman Library we, guess what, have no fire suppression system — in the old stacks or the new stacks.  Apparently the thinking used to be that fire suppression systems should not be installed in libraries for fear of damage to collection in case of a system failure. Moral: A fire suppression system is better than none at all, both from a life-safety stance and a collections safety perspective.
  2. Fire suppression systems do a better job of putting out a fire before it gets out of control and use less water than a fire truck /fire emergency responders (see the great “fire growth curve” in the Nick Artim presentation once it is posted on the NARA website or the time vs. HRR chart on the slide titled “The Role of Suppression on the Frederick Mowrer presentation). Takeaway: A response by your fire suppression system (rather than fire responder on a truck with a big hose) means fewer collection materials wet, or in the worse case, burned. Moral: A fire suppression system will most likely cause less water damage to collections than fire responders, and it will extinguish the fire at an earlier stage as well.
  3. There is not yet consensus on a “best practice” type of fire suppression system. Compelling cases were made for wet pipe (Silence) and low oxygen (Taylor), and there were but a few kind words for dry pipe and enough chatter about problems with pre-active systems to make me nervous about the system in our still new special collections library. Takeaway: Why can’t we agree on something! Moral: If we all agreed on something, we’d never explore newer options made possible with emerging technology (oh, and yes, the world would stop spinning).

Just attending the conference with my two facility management buddies here in the library was a great thing: I’m invited to the inspection the wet-pipe system in our Fine Arts library next week (with the campus-wide facilities folks and the fire suppression contractor!), and we were exposed to a whole new set of worries re: fire suppression and our high density storage facility. Good times!