Mass Examination of the Physical Condition of Library Documents: A Theoretical Aspect

Systemic activities for the preservation of library collections are one of the most important directions of the state cultural policy. As part of the implementation of the “National Programme for the Preservation of Library Collections of the Russian Federation 2001—2010” and the “All-Russian Programme for the Preservation of Library Collections. Second Stage. 2011—2020”, the key points of organizing conservation activities both on a nationwide scale and at the level of individual libraries were outlined.

The effectiveness of measures to preserve library documents is primarily determined by the availability of an up-to-date, objective and comprehensive assessment of the state of the document collections. To solve this problem, starting in 2020, the staff of the Russian State Library is conducting an All-Russian monitoring of the state of preservation of library collections, which necessitates the development of a set of methodological techniques for collecting and evaluating information about the condition of documents. Based on the results of the analysis of national and foreign research practices, a methodology for assessing the physical condition of library documents using a multi-stage stratified sampling method was proposed. The main idea of the presented methodology is based on the fact that in the process of stratification of the library stock, a set of functionally isolated and relatively homogeneous groups of documents is allocated, from which samples are formed for their examination.

Accordingly, the specifics of using methodological and technological techniques within the framework of this methodology are determined by the need to assess the physical condition of big volumes of documents in the shortest possible time in libraries with different volumes and structures of funds, different types, levels, etc.

The testing of the multi-stage stratified sampling methodology in the collections of a number of regional and federal libraries has confirmed the possibility of using it as a way to obtain operational information to develop strategies for preserving document collections both at the level of a particular library and at the level of the country as a whole.

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