Starting next Saturday (5), technicians from the Restoration and Conservation Laboratory (Labcon), at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), will work on restoring documents that were rescued after the floods that hit Rio Grande do Sul in the months of April and May. Last Monday (30), around 250 items arrived at the institution so that recovery can begin.
Since May, on the recommendation of Labcon itself, the Igrejinha museum (in the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre) and the public library of Camaquã (in the south of the state) have frozen documentary items to preserve them before restoration. As Cézar Karpinski, coordinator of Labcon and also of the project, explains, freezing, in itself, is not a treatment, but from it it is possible for the items to be preserved until the treatment begins.
From Igrejinha, 150 documentary items arrived, such as German music scores and 50 books – these were not frozen. Fifty items came from Camaquã, including historical books and magazines.
In order for the freezing to be maintained, the documents were transported in a refrigerated van from Porto Alegre to Florianópolis. Removing the documents from the vehicle to the laboratory also had to be quick – it took around 20 minutes.
In the laboratory, the papers were stored in refrigerators defined as “homemade” by Karpinski. According to him, this is the first time that the laboratory has worked on a treatment like this.
“Few institutions in Brazil have already carried out treatment for collections that have gone through an accident [como as enchentes]”, he explains. “This technology already exists [profissionalmente] in Italy, France and the United States, and we need to bring it here. We need to sensitize the authorities to equip at least two or three laboratories like this in each state”, he adds.
On Saturday (5), when the work is scheduled to begin, Karpinski and the Labcon technical team will defrost two items – one from each collection. From these, chemical and biological tests will be carried out and the document will have the type of ink and type of paper identified.
As the items were frozen, they must go through a drying process, using an air dehumidifier and maintaining the temperature at 20ºC. Only after this will volunteers be able to assist in the recovery treatment, which also involves cleaning, recovering the paper structure and binding. Cezar estimates that the entire work could take up to two years, depending on the state of conservation in which the packages are found.
This content was originally published in Documents rescued in the RS floods will be restored by UFSC technicians on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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