Preparations are underway at the Porto Municipal Public Library to move the million or so documents that are due to be removed by December, the month in which the rehabilitation and expansion work is due to begin.
Two weeks after the closure, the library’s technical team is hard at work. Until the building work begins in December, all the documentation will have to be packed up.
This work has already begun and a room on the first floor serves as a sample of what the library’s various spaces will soon become.
In that small room, hundreds of boxes are being stacked up. Some with dozens of books inside, others with periodicals telling the various news stories of these and other times.
Each box contains an identity card, which ensures which documents are housed there and which will go into safekeeping, where they will remain until the work is completed.
This library, which is as far as the eye can see, houses around one million documents, the equivalent of around 20 kilometers.
The third and last floor of the building, which has housed the library since 1842, houses the monograph depository. The second, monographs and old books. The first floor houses the sound library and the first floor the periodicals.
Each room is apparently identical to the first and almost all of them, but each document is unique and irreplaceable.
Throughout the library’s corridors, hundreds of shelves are being checked: “Unavailable checked”, reads a piece of paper posted by the technical team, indicating that the books have been checked and are ready to go.
However, small pieces of paper – some red and others white – stand out among the books. “They’re ghosts,” the library technicians explained to Lusa, and each one represents a book in circulation, being consulted or loaned out.
Although organized according to the new marking system, some shelves still hold books with the old markings. With the armillary sphere on the spine, most of these pages tell stories of navigation.
If the 12,000 metres of monographs are organized by time period, with the oldest on the interior shelves and the most recent on the sides, the 3,500 metres of old books are mostly organized by weight, with the last shelves of each bookcase accommodating the heaviest ones.
On the second floor, however, it is cassettes and not books that fill the shelves, the fruit of a project that began 50 years ago: the sound library.
Aimed at people who are blind or have difficulty leafing through books, this library has 5,800 books on cassettes and 2,100 digitized books.
Some books are resting in boxes on the stairs of the building. They will soon be leaving for the Almeida Garrett Library, like so many who have already gone and so many others who are yet to come.
In total, 70,000 documents will be transferred to the library located in the gardens of the Crystal Palace, based on criteria of demand and thematic areas.
The library’s first floor houses 7,500 meters of periodicals.
Thousands of newspapers, bulletins, magazines and yearbooks, whose fragile material was not made to last, are stored and treated with the utmost care in five rooms. They range from the 17th century to the present day, the oldest being the “Gazeta da Restauração”, which dates back to 1641.
However, this copy is not kept on these shelves, but in the Casa Forte, a space that houses around 70,000 precious treasures, from medieval manuscripts, such as the Santa Cruz de Coimbra or the Script of Vasco da Gama’s First Voyage to India, to incunabula, printed matter and cartography.
During the works, the Casa Forte treasures will leave the library, “but not the council’s hands”, which will safeguard these documents in one of the municipality’s spaces, Sílvia Faria, head of the municipal library division, told Lusa.
Although they are the responsibility of the local authority, these documents require compliance with specific relative humidity, temperature and safety parameters. The temperature must vary between 18 and 21 degrees and the humidity between 45 and 50%.
These parameters will have to be maintained in the new vault of the renovated library, which will be an epoxy space.
“It’s intense work and requires a great deal of technical skill,” said Sílvia Faria.
Without the capacity to cope with all the work that will be needed between now and December, the library team is currently packing up the documents in advance.
At a later stage, it will monitor the companies responsible for transportation and custody.
Aware that this is a “very demanding” mission, Sílvia Faria hopes that the team will be able to accomplish it in the move, but also in the return to the rehabilitated library, not least because a book out of place is a book lost.
