care and preservation of library material for future generation

Conservation Activities
One of the basic functions of the National Library is to conserve the printed heritage to the future generations. For this purpose the library has separate divisions for physical, chemical, reprographic and digital conservations.

Physical Conservation
All the books damaged by human error or by the natural reasons are mended, repaired and bound in the Binding division. Journals are bound volume wise.

Chemical Conservation
Laboratory Division of the library, established in 1968, is taking care of the chemical treatment of the books. Advanced system of chemical treatment is being adopted to restore the brittle and damaged books. The library is in the process of developing non-chemical treatment system for the preservation of printed materials . Indigenously developed fumigation chamber is being used to destroy the eggs and larvae of insects and termites. Encapsulation is another method of preservation developed by the National Library, India.

Reprographic Preservation

Most of the 19th century newspapers, Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts have already been microfilmed 5000 rolls of microfilms are already produced so far by the Reprography division.






The Chemical Laboratory
Old books are being scanned


Digitisation

The scanning and archiving or rare and brittle books and other documents on compact disc is under taken. English books and documents published before 1900 and Indian publications of pre 1920 are considered for digitisation. So far 6,600 selected books in Indian and English languages have already been scanned and stored on 548 CDs -- a total of over 25,00,000 pages.