>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:03 ^M00:00:23 >> Fenella France: I'm Fenella France, chief of Preservation Research and Testing Division and I want to welcome you to this series of one of our talks presentations. We are absolutely delighted today to be able to introduce Randy Silverman, who is well known to many of you. Randy served as the head of preservation at the University of Utah Marriott Library since 1993. He teaches workshops on disaster planning for the Western States and Territories Preservation Assistance Service WSTPAS and is recognized for his national disaster recovery efforts. He has 80 professional publications and has presented professional lectures or workshops in 30 states and 13 foreign countries, we'll ask for a list later. He was given the American Library Association Banks Harris Preservation award in 2013, received a Fulbright specialist award in 2014, and was awarded the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters Gardner prize for outstanding academic contributions in 2016. When I spoke with Randy last year and we were starting to talk about some collaborative research and he mentioned this project. And we were talking about you know some of the challenges with some of these larger projects and he very graciously agreed to come and talk with us about this. So, his presentation today is a mold outbreak in Tbilisi, Georgia, technical and interpersonal challenges and please help me welcome him today. ^M00:01:46 [ Applause ] ^F00:01:52 ^M00:01:55 >> Randy Silverman: It's all right, it's only cords we're fine. Hello everybody, hello at home. I'm so glad that you're here. This is a really wonderful opportunity, so for the people at home today I'm speaking from the lovely Mary Pickford Auditorium. Do you all remember Mary Pickford? And I'd like to thank Fenella France who's the chief of Preservation Research and Testing here at the Library of Congress for inviting me and for this opportunity to speak today. I'd like to thank Alberta Comer who is my dean at the University of Utah's Marriott Library for her support because that's why I'm here. And I'd like to dedicate this talk to my mom who died last year while I was in Georgia, so there's that. And of course, my better half, Eileen Hallett Stone, who is maybe watching from home, we don't know, and to our colleagues on the ground doing disaster recovery in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria. I'm pleased that the earthquake yesterday in Honduras did not cause a tsunami, which would have further complicated things. And for everybody who has or will spend time as Gary Frost puts it in the disaster fields, thank you very much for your service. I first met Zurab who's the library director at the University of Tbilisi on a US State Department familiarization tour in 2013. He and other Georgian library directors toured the University of Utah's Marriott Library and when I showed him our conservation lab he asked me questions about mold and I didn't know then what he was really talking about. But two years later when this picture appeared in the New York Times captioned zoo animals on the loose in Tbilisi after flooding I was concerned and so I contacted the library to find out if the flood had affected them. And while the collection was unharmed by that flood this mold problem was still going on and it was still a big issue. So, the Blue Shield of Georgia identified grant possibilities and along with the library's conservation department at the university wrote a cultural heritage emergency stabilization grant to the Prince Claus Fund in Amsterdam. And the first grant was not successful, but a year and a half later the second one [audio cuts]. So, I arrived in Tbilisi on January 27th, 2017, which is like a year ago for a 10-day visit and my hosts were Menana [phonetic] who is pictured on your left and who is the head of Blue Shield and Marie who is the paper conservator at Tbilisi State University Library. Georgia for I had weak geography as a child, so I'm always curious like on a map falls under Russia and is situated near Turkey and Armenia. And I mention for the people viewing from Georgia that those striped areas are the territories that were lost during the 2008 Russo Georgian war, that war lasted five days, and the occupation still affects 20% of the country. When I first arrived, it had snowed in Tbilisi which is unusual for them and coming from Florida I thought it was great to see snow on the palms, this is unusual. I was also able to see some of their wonderful historic buildings like this 12th century Orthodox Church and these 19th century hot baths, which is kind of a wonderful thing. And there were carts in the streets selling colorful spices and churchkhela which are traditional homemade Georgian candle-shaped candies. It's a really great place, you should go see it. So, the main library at Tbilisi State University was built in 1987 and it was out at the edge of town. This is a part of the city that was new in 1987 and it was anticipated to grow, but the growth never materialized after the collapse of the Soviet Union December of 1991. So, there was a persistent lack of maintenance money and that's left this 30-year-old building which is about 400,000 square feet largely unheated and very run down. In this slide the yellow parts are the rooms where the rare books are stored, the top one is on the first floor belowground and the other one is the second floor above that, but it's still belowground. And there's actually another room on the second floor sort of toward the core of the building, I'm pointing for those of you at home, I don't know if you can see that. So, those rooms were used for storing rare books for a very long time and they were the problem. So, we suited up to go see the rare books. The young woman who's holding the key was not amused by our use of personal protection equipment she thought it was weird and was kind of put out that it took us so long to prepare to enter this space. She's waiting tapping her foot you know. Notice that at the base of the walls there's signs of moisture damage, that was prevalent throughout the building. So, I would constantly see signs that there had been water damage over time. So, we entered this space and it's kind of dark and mysterious and inside we found 80,000 rare books and that's 80,000 in these multiple rooms, that were stolen from Germany by the retreating Soviet Army at the end of World War II. So, in the 1970's Germany asked for the books back and they were stored at two places in Georgia and the other library gave their books back, they were happy to do it. However, the University of Tbilisi's books were badly molded. And so, Germany really wanted to help, so they offered to come there and they reviewed the problem several times and finally said you know it would be easier to bring the books to Germany and treat the problem where we have a lot of equipment and facilities. And so, they ran with that idea for a while, but there was a glitch because shipping cultural property out of Georgia is against the law, so then they had to change the law to be able to do that even though the books belonged to Germany. And eventually, it just took years and after like a decade Germany said we actually, we don't care anymore, we relinquish our hold on the books they're yours, have a nice day. So, they now legally belong to Tbilisi State University and they're in good shape when you open the book. You know they're rare European imprints and the paper quality looks great, there's no problem until you see the outside. And the outside was coated with a thick layer of mold and the molds changed, there was different types, there's dark molds and light molds and a kind of patterny [phonetic] mold, molds like you've never seen. In fact, I was speaking with people at the Centers for Disease Control in the US and they halfhearted, it was half serious in their jokes saying you know it's a shame to destroy such a rare example of a mature mold ecosystem and it was. They were really interesting. And in fact, so I'm there in in January and this is a largely unheated building, it was freezing cold everywhere except for a few offices. ^M00:10:04 But I was surprised to see that this ancient stand of old growth mold was dry and powdery to the touch in some cases, you could just like push it away. So, it seemed to me on first observation that it's actually growing and thriving in the summer and hibernating in the winter and I didn't know mold did that, so that was interesting to see. So, we started looking for the source of the water and that orange stripe represents a 12-inch city watermain that's running underneath the street and parallel to the library that has been leaking apparently for years. And the university claims that the city water department needs to repair their leaking pipe, that's how it's done in Utah at home right. But the city takes the position that the pipe is running through university property and so it's the university's problem and there's been a standoff. So, the willingness to ignore a problem that was actually causing standing water in the library at some points made me realize that the lack of resources was so serious for everyone that not dealing with problems like this is what you have to do, so that's still taking some adjustment I have to say. So, we examined the building from the basement to the rooftop looking for water sources. Don't you love it I'm in a basement with my suit on, this is typical for tourists right. And we used a moisture meter, which is a really great tool for defining whether or not there is water active in the walls. So, some of the damage in the walls would not set off the moisture meter, it was just old damage as opposed to actively being wet and in some places, there was active mold growing which was you know a little weird. And interestingly, what we were looking for originally was the source of water coming from the street, from that you know because all the mold damage seemed to be in those rooms that were on that side of the building except for that other room that I mentioned, which is in the core of the building. And so, it seemed suspicious that the water could reach the middle of the building without having a central source. So, we checked inside the plumbing chase for the building which runs parallel to the stairs, so going up and the plumbing chase walls were soaking wet. So, the plumbing in the middle of the core of the building is leaking, it's like 30 years of not fixing the pipes right, it's a bad problem at home, it's a bad problem when you have a big library like this. So, the Georgian National Center for Disease Control and Public Health sampled the air and counted the colony forming units in these Petri dishes, they did lots of testing. The primary fungi were Aspergillus and the bacteria was nocardia. Their findings though indicated that and this is a quote, the number of colony forming units in the library does not pose a health risk. I was kind of surprised, in the US we'd shut the building down right, no question shut it down. And yet, this is kind of the response that you might get if there's actually not a way to deal with this and everybody agrees what can we do, we can do nothing, we have to accept this. So, I kept running into things that were a little peculiar in my orientation, but it was a little scary because in fact the library is the testing center for the university, there were about 2,000 people in the building a day and I talked to some people and they got, they had gotten sick or were sick and they were worried. So, I met with the library's administration, this is Zurab again back in Georgia and I expressed my concerns about the health issues and agreed to help diagnose the problem, try and look for the source of water and to define a protocol that would allow them to recover the rare books because in fact the books looked pretty good except for the outside coating of mold. And so, Marie and Menana helped assemble a team of local people that included Lowry [phonetic] who's here sketching because he's the one of the buildings original architects, he was always sketching and now retired, but he wanted to be part of the project because he still loved the building and it just it broke his heart it had not been cared for, which is pretty wonderful. And Lasha [phonetic] whose got his back to us who's a really wonderful man and he's a preservation architect. So, we started thinking about the problem and we met for several days trying to work out you know what an affordable, underline affordable, culturally appropriate solution would look like. So, here we see the back of Menana's head and Lowry and Lasha and in this picture, we have Giorgi [phonetic] who's the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning engineer who's joined us and members of the preservation department. I have to hurry now, that was my mother. Other people who contributed to a proposed solution long distance included Kirk Lively, who's the director of technical services at Belfor. Bernard Mayer, whose Belfor's major loss operations person in Europe who actually volunteered to come to Georgia and set up the drying and the air ventilation solution for just his travel costs. He was going to come on his own time and just volunteer to do that, which is really extraordinary. Allen Rogers at a company called Zentox in Canada, which is an air purification company. Ian Poole Corroventa, a supplier of dehumidification equipment in England. Because there's a big problem how are we going to get this stuff to Georgia. And Doctors Cox, Ganser [phonetic] and Park at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. So, we all agreed as Kirk Lively put it that the building had to be dried first to stop the mold bloom, makes sense. So, vacuuming mold off the books and then returning them to a humid environment only provides a temporary solution and will allow the mold to continue thriving. So, Lawry recommended we dig an architectural gallery on three sides of the building and that's what the yellow arrow is pointing to. And a gallery which is a term I didn't know is, this is an example of a gallery I found someplace else, they're using these. This is an architectural gallery in this case designed to allow people to see historic foundations of a building so you could use it for that purpose. The library's gallery would be graded on top, so it would get air ventilation and people could walk over it. Be bricked on one side so the, you know, to keep the dirt from caving in and allow this airspace where the airflow would dry the walls of the building and prevent moisture from coming in direct contact with the basement walls and if it did it would dry because of air circulation. It seemed like a pretty neat idea, we're talking about digging a hole around the building right, pretty simple. So, we took that idea and presented it to Nunu who is the chancellor for Tbilisi State University in an hour-long meeting. And we kept the proposal as simple and cost-effective as possible. So, here I'm presenting a PowerPoint summation of our recommendations and I'm using a laptop so that was the most straightforward way to do that. And in in the room are also Zurab and there's Nunu in the background, Marie and other administrators. So, while I was there the library people also asked me to give a public lecture on the causes of mold and ways to mitigate those kinds of problems. And so, the talk was well attended, you kind of like you guys showing up that's really wonderful. And it was a Saturday afternoon and we were in the other library, it turned out there's another library in the main campus in the middle of Tbilisi which was neat as a pin right, so that was also a clue that maybe this other library wasn't loved for some reason, I don't know. So, I gave a talk about what I think we know as a profession about mold and if you'll permit me I'd like to share those ideas with you. Actually, it's the core of what I want to talk about today, it's the meaningful part, the takeaway. So, while nobody knows for certain how many types of mold there are, it's estimated that there are between 100,000 and 300,000 species of mold on earth along with the ants and the buzzards okay. The fungi represent approximately 3 1/2% of all living species, so it seems clear to me that mold is not an afterthought. Common indoor mold species include Cladosporium, Penicillium, Alternaria and Aspergillus, they're here, they're around us. What you may not know this and this is an interesting thing to consider, one cubic meter of outdoor air may contain as many as a million spores okay. And a grown person at rest inhales about two and half gallons of air per minute. So, what that means is on average people inhale close to 600,000 spores per hour all the time okay, interesting right. ^M00:20:06 But inside a moldy building like that it could be 10 times that, so 600,000 is your minimal daily dose per hour okay, that's normal, a normal day. Mycelium is a vegetative part of the fungi consisting of a mass of branching threadlike hyphae. The white or transparent hyphae may be minute forming a colony that's too small to see or the mycelium might be extensive appearing like very fine fluffy white threads over the surface. Mycelium is considered a single organism. Typically mold secrete hydraulic enzymes mainly from the hyphae tips to degrade complex biopolymers, biopolymers such as starch, cellulose and lignin, our stuff right into simpler monomers that can be absorbed by hyphae. Molds play a vital role in causing the decomposition of organic matter that enables recycling of nutrients throughout the ecosystems, it's good for us. When mold is ready to reproduce small treelike fruiting bodies form on the ends of the hyphae. The dusty texture of many molds is caused by the profuse production of asexual spores called conidia that grow on the tree-shaped hyphae. The mode of formation and the shape of these spores is traditionally used as the method for classifying molds. These spores come in a variety of colors making the fungus much more obvious to the human eye at this stage in its lifecycle. So, we like it when it's pretty or we don't really don't like it when it's pretty, it depends. When we think of mold germinating in dark warm damp humid places we tend to forget that mold also grows in the refrigerator right. So, the question is and this is the question for you guys right, how long will a jar of applesauce stored under Saran wrap be good to eat right. Three days, a week? Do you have a teenager? If your refrigerator is working right it's probably fine for a week right, but if applesauce is forgotten behind the other groceries for three weeks there might be a tipping point somewhere. The deal is if food is sitting around for some time it can cause an activation trigger for mold when the storage environment is right. Environmental factors that affect mold growth include the standard environmental factors. Temperature, a refrigerator in good repair hovers around 37 degrees Fahrenheit or 3 degrees Celsius for my folks at Georgia, but cold, it's cold but not frozen. The relative humidity of applesauce is very humid. Light levels in the refrigerator are nice and dark right and airflow which is restricted by the Saran wrap may be an issue okay. So, our Finnish colleagues Hukka and Vitanen developed a model that characterizes six stages of mold growth. Of these the first two stages include no visible sign of mold except under magnification right, it's among us but we can't really see it. That leads us to remember that mold may be actively growing around us, but we are not aware of it. So, if you allow me to anthropomorphize the question a little. What is the tipping point at which mold decides that an open jar of applesauce is fair game all right, when will that occur? And for that I think we need to call in the experts. So, I'm going to tap into Monty Python who will try and answer for us the age-old question, how can you tell when an object is really dead. >> Here's one, nine pence. >> I'm not dead. >> What? >> Nothing, here's your nine pence. >> I'm not dead. >> Here, he says he's not dead. >> Yes, he is. >> I'm not. >> He isn't. >> Well, he will be soon, he's very ill. >> I'm getting better. >> No, you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment. >> Oh, I can't take him like that, it's against regulations. >> I don't want to go in the cart. >> Oh, don't be such a baby. >> I can't take him. >> I feel fine. >> Oh, do us a favor. >> I can't. >> Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long. >> Nah, I got to go on to Robinson's they've lost nine today. >> Well, when is your next round? >> Thursday. >> I think I'll go for a walk. >> You're not fooling anyone you know. Look, isn't there something you can do? >> I feel happy, I feel happy. >> Ah, thanks very much. >> Not at all. See you on Thursday. >> Right. ^M00:25:04 [ Laughter ] ^M00:25:08 >> Randy Silverman: The earth does not leave dead things lying around for long. Buzzards and ants and mold all work to clean up mother nature's dead to recycle them back to carbon. It's part of the complex balance the governs our lovely blue jewellike and very hungry planet. For mold the rules are really quite simple, if it's breathing it's not dead and it's not food, where there's breath there's life. Wind is just the planet breathing as far as mold is concerned. So, we should remember it's when things get out of equilibrium that mold feels invited to the feast. So, let's look at a couple examples. This is Lascaux Cave some drawings from Lascaux Cave in southwestern France, we're not in France now I'll clarify that point, though you at home may be I don't know. So, the cave contains some 600 paintings believed to be 17,300 years old. It's among the most significant cultural artifacts on earth and was inscribed in UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1979. Lascaux Cave was discovered by 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat and three friends who were trying to rescue their dog who had fallen through a foxhole in September of 1940. You had to be a kid to find those drawings because they were nowhere near the entrance of the cave and they were hidden in complete darkness right, teenagers. Like most caves Lascaux was perpetually cold and very humid above 95% and it was free of visible mold. Wanting to share this important find a large-scale earthwork was begun in 1947. And so, they redesigned the cave's entrance to permit visitor access. This permanently and irreversibly changed the natural equilibrium inside the cave and black mold was first reported on the walls in 1947 in that same year. ^M00:27:24 ^M00:27:36 The cave opened to the public July of 1948 and by 1955 Lascaux received 30,000 visitors per year. By 1960, that was 100,000 people which works out to about 1,800 visitors per day at its peak and an average of 70 people per hour right, things were really crowded there. In 1950, they put a stairway and a double access door in and it was designed as an airlock specifically, that's indicated by the blue arrow. During the 1955 tourist season the cave experienced abnormally high levels of carbon dioxide, condensation on the walls, and high temperatures. So, what would you do? They put in an HVAC system in 1958 and it was able to maintain the cave's temperature at 57 degrees Fahrenheit which is 14 degrees C and 95% Rh, normal is 95% Rh right, that's interesting right, it doesn't mold all the time just because it's wet. Although this prevented condensation on the walls discrete green spots however described by the curator as green disease were noted in 1960 near the artwork in the axial gallery. By 1963, this mold outbreak became denser and extended to the hall of bulls. The cave was closed to the public that year and the committee convened to study the problem. Antibiotics and formalin were used to kill the mold on the floors and the walls, including the painted surfaces themselves. That original HVAC system failed in 1998 after 40 years of service and it was replaced by an improved hydrothermal regulator in 1999. This precipitated the active mold event now referred to as the crisis of 2001. Here we see air sampling being conducted in Lascaux Caves axial gallery. The mold species determined to be responsible for the outbreak was identified as Fusarium Solani and here we see visible signs of the active mold growth in the axial gallery in 2001. ^M00:30:02 So, treatment options were explored for killing the mold on the walls and paintings during the crisis of 2001 and these included, this is radical, gassing Lascaux methyl bromide raising the carbon levels so the environment would become lethal to the mold and other biological measures. Each of those ideas was determined to be too risky for the artwork. In the end, quaternary ammonium which is alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride, which is a fungicide used in the papermaking industry proved effective. This was used in conjunction with spreading quicklime on the floors. Quicklime is a caustic calcium oxide and it was used to raise the cave's Ph and dehydrate the microorganisms. Here we see a poultice containing the fungicide being used directly over the artwork. You'll be comforted to know that a literature search assured the participants this approach would prove harmless to the rock art. A second example of mold getting its signals crossed due to an environmental imbalance occurred after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I visited Biloxi Public Library with my friend Gary Frost where we found some of the windows broken in the library so there was airflow inside the building and there were pine needles on the floor about a foot and a half deep. It was surreal to walk on it, it's like walking on mattresses. So, we're padding lightly inside of the library, which in fact showed no visible signs of mold three weeks after the storm, though it was summertime, it was really hot, very humid. Eventually the building would be lost to mold however. We did find, however, in the basement a glass exhibit case that did not get directly wet, was raised up, but it's a closed glass, locked glass case and it contains these baskets that are completely covered in gray mold, that gray is not the way the baskets looked before the mold this is after. The rare book room which was kind of a sequestered space in the building had map drawers that were when you pulled them out the mold was thriving. And this is an interesting one okay, inside of a storage cabinet Gary found this Tyvek envelope that was molding badly, but inside the same storage cabinet there were paper envelopes with similar books in them in the same drawer that were not molding. The Tyvek envelope made the book look like that right, what does that tell us, do you think I'm leading you? I'm glad you're a bunch of smart folks. So, I'd like to look at some preventive concepts right, to balance that out a little bit. So, here let's start with the great pyramid of Khufu. This is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids in the Giza pyramid complex and it's also the oldest of the seven wonders of the ancient world and the only one still remaining largely intact. A unique feature of this pyramid is that the king's burial chamber is cross-ventilated. Here we can see in the image air vents that penetrate from the pyramid's north and south faces and all the way into the king's burial chamber. The queen's chamber also has air vents and while they're longer than the vents for the king's burial chamber they were never completed. So, they're 20 feet short of reaching the outside of the pyramid interesting. But that room was never used so maybe that explains why they didn't bother to complete them or they're waiting you know. The air vents into the king's chamber supply a fresh flow of air in the otherwise stagnant space. but they're not straight channels. The northern air duct for instance, measures 5 by 7 inches and begins as a dome-shaped vent that penetrates the granite wall horizontally for 6 inches, changes shape to an oval that angles upward for another 8 inches, and then changes shape again to a rectangle that passes through 160 feet of granite masonry to the exterior of the pyramid. Additionally, with each shape shift the duct changes direction, so it first heads due south, then it heads southwest and then further southwest. So, these air ducts that's the actual, it's a picture it's hard to make it out until you focus on it right, but that's a picture of the air duct that I just described where it begins in the king's chamber. So these, you know, realize how intentional this is. You had to cut the ducts in the granite blocks before you laid them in place. This is all preliminary to actually setting these stones. So, one might argue that this natural cross-ventilation was needed to provide fresh air during the pharaoh's funeral rites which were performed by porch light inside the core of the pyramid. It's also a possibility, this is what I'm proposing we consider you conservation types, that this is a thoughtful architectural feature designed to provide appropriate environmental storage conditions for the ages. Can we have a vote, can we have a show of hands? So, there are other more recent examples, let me show you. This is a classic 18th-century cedar hope chest, notice it's raised off the floor and the lid which is you know cut from wood is not airtight, so we get airflow below it and through that little gap in the lip of the cover. This effectively promotes slow, steady ventilation and a stable environment, it's in the human comfort zone at the foot of the bed. This is a 19th-century iron bookshelf that has a screen grate at the bottom and it promotes air circulation behind and around the books. This is one from the US Department of Agriculture, freshly picked and shelled high moisture corn can present a mold problem in storage. The alternative is and this is from 1969, is to use unheated outside air forced through a grate at the bottom of the storage container, which then filters up through the top of the unit, so airflow equals no mold, long-term grain storage. Elementary schools closed for the summer lock all the doors and windows and they're trying to prevent vandalism makes sense except this can lead to a mold outbreak by the time they come back to open up the building in the fall. So, a way to prevent a mold bloom could be as simple as opening up the windows a crack and allowing the building to breathe like a cave. But I think the most telling example is that I am breathing 600,000 mold spores an hour and I'm not breaking out in mold. Those conidia are certainly landing in a warm, dark and humid environment right. But I think in each of these examples we can see the usefulness or the necessity of allowing airflow to prevent mold growth right, what if we could actually communicate with it, maybe not. But there are triggers for mold events and that's what we have to wrap our head around. When do we see it coming right, when is it a possibility that we're going to actually have this thing happen because the moment before it's happened like the Biloxi public library things are good and eventually that building was torn down. So, ways that we can deal with it include conservation heating, dehumidification and adaptive ventilation. Heating right, it's a kind of counterintuitive thing, in the summertime and Biloxi would we actually turn up the heat, but warm air holds more moisture than cold air so there's an option in some circumstances. But alternatively, the one I like the most is desiccant or refrigerant dehumidification, which can effectively lower the relative humidity inside great big buildings to 25% and rapidly dries out everything, everything. Adaptive ventilation promotes drying, so air passing over a wet surface retains water. According to a 2004 study by Tim Padfield, moving air becomes completely saturated when it passes over wet material regardless of the air's speed. So, airflow changes surface tension causing evaporation that can prevent fungal growth in caves, elementary schools and in my lungs. Tyvek envelopes, sealed glass exhibit cases, and locked doors intended to protect rare books prevent airflow that can readily lead to an environmental imbalance. As noted by Monty Python and now I'm quoting the best, the difference between the living and the dead is so tenuous that it can be easily mistaken. This is an essential truth for mold. In situations where there's no ready access to electricity as with this Historical Society in rural Mississippi flooded during Hurricane Katrina, the only option may be to simply open the windows right, it makes sense. ^M00:40:03 There are conditions where we would find that very difficult, but in theory this will change the environment inside and it might help. The problem in this particular case was the curators were more concerned about vandals than they were about mold and so they kept shutting the windows, they would leave and they would shut the windows. Sterilization is a technical option when we're dealing with mold and so it should be discussed, but we should not use it casually. The caption on this cartoon reads wanting his picnic with Gwen to be perfect Hal made sure they would not be bothered by ants. Sterilization is expensive, it can damage cultural property, but when flooding involves sewage or other biological human risks it may be necessary to consider. So, let me touch on it briefly, due diligence right. The image of a commercial, this image of a commercial ethylene oxide chamber was provided by Sterigenics. The effectiveness of ethylene oxide sterilization is dependent on load density, gas concentration, steam inject, and the cycle time. Each of these factors have to be correctly applied in order for the sterilization process to be effective. Ethylene oxide is non-damaging to paper as verified in the 1960's by Francois [inaudible]. This is a schematic of a gamma radiation chamber that was also provided by Sterigenics. You can see that it's a simple system actually, it's a lead shell with a core of nuclear material inside. And the stuff that you need to sterilize passes by that. Gamma radiation sterilization is a simpler process than ethylene oxide. The density of the product determines the cycle time and the dosage required in the radiator. The validation process is shorter, so it may cost less than ethylene oxide. However, gamma radiation cleaves covalent bonds, which makes it absolutely damaging to cultural property, just a heads up. At the end of the day killing mold by sterilization is a little like bringing pesticides to a picnic however. Whether mold is dead or merely inactive due to the lack of moisture it's the same effect, it doesn't really matter. Inactive mold stops consuming organic material and it desiccates. It could do no further harm if environmental conditions prevent its recurrence and the desiccated mold can be vacuumed up with a HEPA vac or it can just simply be brushed away. And you should do this outside with the wind coming over your shoulder so you don't actually get a face full of desiccated mold. So, thank you for that detour, back on the point of the talk. I got back to the United States after my trip to Georgia, a wonderful place you should visit, it really was great, I loved it actually. And I wrote a final report defining the source of the mold problem and providing the library with a protocol for recovery of its rare books. In summary, you know, we can summarize, in our easy armchairs we can summarize. The way to deal with this problem in Georgia in my estimation and that of colleagues was that the free water must be eliminated in the building and to do that we would need to construct a gallery on three sides of the building to provide a barrier between the groundwater and the basement walls. We would need to repair the culinary water pipes in the core of the building and realize those are running in the walls, that may be really difficult. And we decided we really needed to add downspouts to be able to move the rainwater away from the base of the building. Everything we could do to eliminate water into the building. The mold spores need to be prevented from spreading into the rest of the building while we're trying to deal with these really, really moldy rooms. So those rooms need to be positively ventilated, that's kind of a trick because they're down in a subbasement. But what we need to do is exhaust the air from the room while we're drying it through HEPA filters and exhausted to the outside, not through the building or get the hoses to go through the building. So, it's a little complicated, it's the kind of equipment we wouldn't have lying around. But we could bring equipment in and I talked to people who are willing to do it. So next, the storage rooms needed to be dehumidified and that would dehydrate the mold and once it was dehydrated it would be inactive and so the desiccated mold could be cleaned simply enough by HEPA vacuuming it up, we could just HEPA vac up the mold and on the books on the walls on the shelves. Whether we did the books in the same room or not was open to discussion, but we could even start there just vacuuming them up. And then the walls and the shelves needed to be washed with soap and water. That was from the CDC and I was fascinated because they're not talking about the use of chlorine at all, soap and water. Because in fact adding chlorine to the environment might bother people who have already got sensitivities going on because of all that mold and of course all this has to be done wearing personal protective equipment. And afterwards we need to judiciously aerate the rooms and the building, find a way to create airflow. But now a year later I am sorry to report mold is still on the books. I've had a report from Georgia that they had some success repairing that pipe out on the street and so maybe that source of water is gone, but I think the water inside the building is still a major problem. I was actually really, I'm still really disappointed with this outcome and maybe that's the way I want to leave this talk this morning or this afternoon, it's still morning where I live. If we come from out of country and offer up solutions that seem simple enough, seem reasonable it doesn't mean they're actually affordable, it doesn't mean that they're within the scope of the kind of work people can actually take on or that they meet the priorities of the people. And I don't know what those are, but I don't think they're books. And this is a historic building that's being preserved by just leaving it in spaces. They've protected it in that it's identified as such in this whole region of town, including this next slide behind Marie, those are supports for a historic part of town, 18th and 19th century buildings that they're preventing from falling in by having put braces in place, but there's no money for repairing them. So, at this point in the history of Tbilisi and of Georgia there are bigger issues then dealing with some things like cultural property. And so, we have to delay our ambition to see a solution, it would make me happy, it would make her happy, and I don't know when it's going to happen. I'd like to thank a whole bunch of people, the people in Georgia, people of the CDC, Kirk Lively, the bunch of folks at Belfor, for people at Sterigenics. And Jeff David who actually decorated this paper, that's a splatter design on paper that's not actually mold, well you knew that right. So, I'll leave it with that, thank you very much. ^M00:48:25 [ Applause ] ^F00:48:33 ^M00:48:35 >> Fenella France: Do we have questions for Randy? I'm actually going to ask Randy for the benefit of our people offsite to repeat and rephrase the question. >> Randy Silverman: Thank you. >> Fenella France: Any questions? >> Randy Silverman: Oh, I can rephrase it, so I'll tell lies. Now is my chance, I'm in Washington. Oh wait, that was not nice sorry, sorry. Who's got a question? Yes. >> Randy, just for clarification the galleries were not built for this [inaudible]? >> Randy Silverman: Correct, we were not able to build the galleries, at least to this point they have not built. >> I imagine that would be pretty expensive to undertake? >> Randy Silverman: Every -- so, the is you know would it be prohibitive because it's expensive. It's a big building, but honestly the beauty of the idea was that it was digging a hole and that manual labor or a backhoe was within scope of the kinds of things people could imagine doing. Bringing dehumidifiers was not necessarily and so there's sort of you know levels of buy-in, but it didn't seem strange to the local people, to the architect and to the preservation architect to be able to dig that gallery, and they've done other similar projects. I think, however, at this particular moment in the history of Georgia it's not as possible as it might've been 10 years ago, so I think it's actually the time at which this is occurring. ^M00:50:03 Does that help? >> Yes. >> Randy Silverman: Thank you. Please Andrew. >> So, is there some impediment to moving the books like it seems like the building is the problem, so you have moldy books, the books could be moved to another location, but undoubtedly there's a reason that this, I mean were not. But it just seems like [inaudible]. >> Randy Silverman: So, Andrew's question for those of you at home I'll try and do a better job, I'm a reporter on the scene. Andrew suggests that it would be reasonable to move the moldy books to a different space and clean them up and keep the books there. It's a good idea and let me say that we talked about it at length. We actually identified a different place in the building. The problem with the building itself is a lack of controls, but the part that we visited seemed to be dry, but again they were locked rooms right, a series of locked rooms. But we talked about actually putting a fume hood, a new fume hood in this place and using that as a staging area and then keeping the books in that part of the library. There was a hesitation to jump ahead and not cure the mold problem in the basement for fear that it would not be cured and that the building would remain so unhealthy and that it would affect the people. But I think it's a very real possibility and I think the director of the library really wanted the books treated because they're valuable books. So, it's completely possible to actually move the books to a dry space, rehab the space so that it would be safe to work in to eliminate the mold, and leave those rooms moldy. But there is a hesitation about whether they would then just be forgotten as like moldy, you know, and maybe the CDC would then be happy that they're growing, they're still going nicely as a study so. Please. >> These are [inaudible], not indigenous culture heritage they were actively collected and [inaudible]. Have they thought about pragmatically going through what they have, if they had any, this is what they have, cleaning up and selling some to fund the work [inaudible]? >> Randy Silverman: That's interesting yeah. We didn't really talk, I think there's a desire to keep them because of their value, but I think the idea -- I will pass it along, the idea of cleaning them and selling them to be able to clean the building is interesting. They're not indigenous books, they are, you know, they're I think of interest because they are not in Georgian or Russian, but actually Latin books. And I think it's a very interesting idea because there's a real lack of money. The other cultural problem is that you know f A plus B does not necessarily get us to see. In effect, it might be that if we figured out that they were valuable and started to sell them that the money might not come back to the library anyway, that the priorities are still greater. And we don't know what they are, they could be health issues, they could be human issues that you and I would probably agree they are the most important issues. So, I think it's just a time in the history of this project that it's not particularly going to work. Yeah. >> And a related note. >> Randy Silverman: Yes. >> You said they were originally in Germany, do you know anything [inaudible]? >> Randy Silverman: I don't I actually was told Germany as a generic, I tried to press a little bit and I didn't get any information about that. I don't know which library they were dealing with or which group of people, you know, were the Germans, but the Germans were very generous in trying to deal with the problem but there was a lot of difficulty. And so, there were people getting involved. What's been wonderful is I have not met anybody who's aware of this problem who wasn't willing to you know, give of themselves to try and help make it better and. >> I was just wondering if [inaudible]? >> Randy Silverman: So, the question is where were those original books, where were they housed in Germany. I don't know that, I don't know that sorry. >> Fenella France: One question from offsite. Are there preservation service programs in Georgia? >> Randy Silverman: The question from offsite is are there preservation service programs in Georgia. The program is basically Menana, this Georgian Blue Shield is a very active group and they've had a series of disaster training workshops that I'm aware of and they are trying to coordinate, but I don't know that there's very much funding to support these things. I'm very proud of the work that they've done. And the kinds of cultural property you know when I show you these European books it pales compared to the Georgia books I was shown, I was shown some astounding stuff, amazing things, really gorgeous. There's great cultural property there to be cared for and people are concerned. I saw another hand, where? ^M00:55:35 ^M00:55:39 >> This just on one of the slides [inaudible]? >> Randy Silverman: A series of stamps. ^M00:55:47 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:55:55 Stadsbibliotek was identified as maybe what the stamp said inside the book. I've actually not looked closely, but I think that's true. So, you know, the Germans tried to help make the problem better, they really did and I think they would've been happy to take the books back at one point, but too much red tape. Yasmine. >> You went into the space also, how do the library staff access the space, do they use the books, what is [inaudible]? >> Randy Silverman: So, the question from Yasmine is what does the library staff do relative to going in and out of that space and how are they using the books currently. I was shocked to see some people, I mean I made it a big part of my report I didn't note this. But anyone going in there, I mean it's the most severe mold outbreak I've seen and anyone going in there needs to have personal protection equipment. But the person with the key for instance thought that was hooey she didn't care, it was like a ridiculous you know Western attitude, what was I bringing to the problem, what was I thinking. I was you know obviously and she did wander in and out of it, I mean and others. So, I know there are people who react differently to mold and she was hardy, there's no question. There are people in the library, so the answer to the book question, they're not using the books and there's a little effort to vacuum off the mold and so we went through that protocol, but it's very slow. These are 80,000 books, so it's a slow process and they were trying to vacuum every single page. I suggested we focus just on the exterior mold and let it be enough. It's a question you know what's enough. But the people in the library is a really interesting question because one person who was doing digital scanning got sick and so he went to the doctor and the doctor said you have a respiratory thing, take this whatever this was, and don't do that work for three weeks. And so, he came back to work, but kind of was not working and I said well do I mind if I use you as an example to plead the case that there are health problems here and he said oh that'll be fine. And then he thought about it overnight and he said tomorrow said no way, don't do that because and he left it at that. But others explained to me that if you put your job in jeopardy you might never get another job and that there were young people caring for their parents and their parents at home were in their 40's and they were essentially retired out because there were limited jobs. So, people are not willing to openly say we have a problem because there's consequences so. >> Fenella France: We have a couple more questions from offsite, they're quite long ones. Do you want to speak? >> Fenella France: Let me just. >> Randy Silverman: Yeah, just say it. >> Fenella France: So, one question is, would there be a problem from a health standpoint for future access of the collection post-mold cleaning due to the scale of the problems, so it's a wee bit supposition. >> Randy Silverman: Yes, good for you, that's a great question and it enters in an area that we don't really know definitively how to define. For cost reasons it's fair to assume that just removing the mold on the books is probably the extent of the treatment that would be possible. One of the hesitations to doing that and then putting the books back in the storage place in the building is it's maybe not environmentally dry enough for us to get away with just having vacuumed it off. But we could monitor them and we could monitor the Rh in rooms that they chose to house them in. And if things were improved or kept to a minimum, basically the number we think of is below 65% relative humidity, we're probably going to be all right. ^M01:00:05 But the question you know if you're probing me to say if a person was really sensitive to molds and the people who are for instance have just had children, they've given birth, they have immune deficiency problems, they've had surgery, they have AIDS, that category of person tends to get a reaction to mold more easily than say me. And that being the case, it would be difficult to say that for everyone just having vacuumed off the mold will be enough. I think so, however, I feel pretty good about that saying that would be a solution in most cases, but I'd really like to see ventilation, outdoor air coming into a building that had this kind of problem. I was involved, if I could just say, I was involved in a different disaster in 1997 at Colorado State University and because of that very thing every book that was damaged, it was 450,000 books. Got a little slip inside it that said this is a copy of a book that was in that flood and so it's like a heads up. This space because it was an entire floor of the building, this space in theory is maybe different and maybe you should. I suggested to the university it would be wise to just post that. >> Fenella France: One more [inaudible]. >> Randy Silverman: Sure. >> Fenella France: What was the interest or buy-in for the community to support the stabilization and conservation of the books on site? >> Randy Silverman: I don't think the community generally knows about this book collection, so I don't know what the status of that information is. But when I told people of course everybody is sympathetic to the idea that we should fix this problem. But I don't think it was widely known that there are books and certainly not in that condition. And I would think for instance when the Center for Disease and Health from Georgia got involved that they would've been kind of shocked by things and the fact that they weren't makes me think there's a different standard than I'm aware of at play. One and two good. Hi, hi Nora. >> Hi, could you tell us how you got CDC involved and the [inaudible]? >> Randy Silverman: It's a wonderful question, so Nora [inaudible] asked when did I get the CDC involved, how smart am I. The question actually is it's a really interesting answer. I left Georgia on a plane like some, you know, five in the morning kind of flight out of you know small countries and I was so frustrated, I knew we didn't quite get there and I was desperate. And so, I was talking to my seatmate, a woman sat down one seat over and we talked all the way to Germany who was from the CDC. You know there is goodness and mercy in the world, but it's hiding. But she sat down and she connected, I told her how desperate the situation was and she connected me with people in Atlanta who connected me with specialists in West Virginia who deal with mold. And so, it was by virtue of serendipity, a great research tool. Andrew. >> Yeah, so I'm thinking now about the ventilation and the shafts to the king's tomb and. >> Randy Silverman: There you go. >> And clearly that was planned out ahead of time you know for whatever reasons. Are there anyone that you know of [inaudible] planning these kinds of things into future building designs for libraries, for cultural heritage divisions to say let's put in an architectural gallery, let's put in an [inaudible] system that we can hook up to any interior space in the building as we need to do this kind of thing? >> Randy Silverman: So. Andrew is asking for those of you at home, you know the king's ventilation shafts, the pyramidal ventilation shafts is such an ideal use of existing technology that it leaves me stunned frankly. And you're observing that there's a real merit in capturing ideas like that and applying them in the present day is absolutely a theme I have going in the back of my head. What do we know that we've forgotten right, what as a culture have we like eliminated for whatever reason and simply overlooked at this point. Because when I found those shafts just looking through literature I was shocked, it was like look at what they thought of back then. And Andrew asked are thinking about applying those in modern buildings. I don't know enough about architecture, this is a -- I'm out of my depth, but there are people, especially planning conservation environments who know an awful lot about this. But what you're leading to is a very key point and then I probably have to wrap up. But the idea that if we build buildings that are hermetically sealed because we can do HVAC control that's great as long as it's working and the day that it's not working we don't have a second option right. It's a completely sealed system on purpose, which puts us at a huge disadvantage and or when there's something wrong in the building, it's just a little out of whack. Getting to a place that we could ventilate the book storage in Georgia was going to be difficult, we would have to ventilate upstairs and out. You'd have to have a mile of the tubing and or cut a hole right through the wall, which I doubt they were interested in doing below-grade. So, when we build modern buildings are we thinking this way. I think there's a group of people who are aware of this stuff, but we should be harvesting and I'll leave this at the last note, we should be harvesting the bright ideas in every way that we can and some of them are ancient. And to ignore these old ideas because they're outdated is not really paying attention. When we get into a fix and we're desperate for an answer, when we start clutching at straws and we come across something like this we should be talking to each other, we should be harvesting these ideas because it's not out of its own time now, it's still time for us to come up with alternatives and variations on the way we're approaching things. >> Can I ask a final question? >> Randy Silverman: Yes, I would love one more question. >> Just to return to the university library. Obviously, they're operating on a different reality, but despite that were there any lessons learned for you that you could share with us? If you had to do it again, would you do anything differently and [inaudible] forward to the next time or are you [inaudible]? You know there are going to be limitations on their reality. >> Randy Silverman: Mary Oi [phonetic] just asked the million-dollar question, what did I learn. I approached the problem with a sense of being able to solve it. I was so convinced the answer was intellectually within grasp and I was so knocked off center by my inability to do that. And the thing I would like to share with you is we can know how to fix it and we can still not be able to fix it. It's a terrible position to be in, it's really terrible and you know what it's like a combination of things. But in answer to your question, I failed pure and simple. I don't know that I could have won, I don't know how. I begged the people on the ground you know six and eight months later to tell me how I could've done better and they said you did fine, you know, what are they going to say, they're going to insult me and tell me what an idiot I am, I doubt it. But I have to say I think they were sincere and I think all we can do is try, I think the best we can do is try. And the idea of harvesting old ideas that still are valid or looking more carefully at things that we have rejected along the way so that I can bring a cheap answer. The answer was cheap, if I could have just found a way to do it for free. I was conning people into, you know, goading people into coming for nothing if they would just show up on site and ventilate that room appropriately so it wasn't a health risk, I had a man committed to doing several trips if he had to, to work for nothing to make this better, and there was not money to do that. So unfortunately, I'm actually having to swallow the raw pill that it's not possible in every case to fix these things and we all live with failures in little ways all of the time, it's humbling, it's frustrating, and we can do better. I would hate to say, to leave this on a negative note, but optimism is not necessarily going to be able to fix it. So, thank you very much. ^M01:09:58 [ Applause ] ^M01:10:07 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress, visit us at LOC.gov.