IFLA PAC Centres in Qatar and Russia Continue Cooperation in the Field of Preservation of Cultural Heritage

In October 2019, the IFLA PAC Center in Russia hosted a visitor from the IFLA PAC Centre in Qatar to facilitate exchange of expertise and cooperation between specialists from the two centres. 

This visit was the third of its kind within this framework of bilateral cooperation. These events started in 2018 with the visit of Chanaka Perera, the conservation technician from the Qatar National Library, who took part in the International Scientific and Practical Conference “Preservation of Rare Books” organized by the Library for Foreign Literature. During this visit, he also introduced conservation specialists from Russia to some of the activities of the Qatar National Library and the Qatar PAC Center. 

In April 2019, two conservation specialists Mariia Kolpakova and Evgenia Vivdenkova from the Library for Foreign Literature visited the Qatar National Library and participated in the workshop “Book Bindings Conservation”. In this workshop, the participants were introduced to various methods and techniques for the conservation of book bindings. The Russian conservation specialists drew upon the expertise of the Qatar National Library, which they found of great interest and use.

In October 2019 the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Practical Conference “Rare Books in the Context of Preservation” was held in Moscow. This conference was organized by the Library for Foreign Literature and the PAC Center for the CIS and Eastern Europe.

The main topics of the conference included the study of rare book collections of Russia and Austria, problems of preservation and conservation of rare books and sheet music, documents, photographs, in addition to other library materials. More than 100 specialists from Russia, Austria, Switzerland, and Qatar, attended the conference.

The conference was also webcasted online; the webcast received more than 220,000 views, giving this conference a wide exposure worldwide.

The participation from Qatar came through Fareed AlShishani, the Conservation Technologist at the Qatar National Library, with a presentation of an insightful paper on the Qatar National Library’s experience in risk management.

In his presentation Fareed described the different types of disasters and their risks, how to prepare for them, and minimize the damage before, during, and after the disaster. The presentation also introduced the different types of damage on library collections, resulting from various disaster hazards, and the measures to prevent such damage, with the aim to preserve the library resources and the authenticity of library materials.

We look forward for further cooperation and exchange of expertise between both PAC Centers on such important topics for the preservation and conservation of library collections.