Between 26 and 29 November 2025, the National Library of Romania hosted the workshop “Saving Books: Treatments, Prevention, Conservation’” part of a project carried out in collaboration with the National Library of France and made possible through the Erland Kolding Nielsen grant awarded by CENL.
Nearly 50 specialists (restorers, librarians, conservators) from the National Library of Romania and some other Romania’s foremost cultural institutions, including the Library of the Romanian Academy, the Bucharest Metropolitan Library, the National History Museum of Romania, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Maps and Old Books, and the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, gathered to participate in the workshops. The event offered an engaging platform for advanced training and for sharing best practices in the protection and preservation of written heritage.
The program offered an intensive, practice-oriented training course focused on preventive conservation, diagnostic analysis, and treatment, highlighting methods and solutions widely used in international conservation practice.
The workshops were led by two representatives of the Conservation Department of the National Library of France:
The program combined theoretical presentations, case studies, and practical workshops, providing participants with concrete tools to strengthen prevention and intervention strategies for the written heritage in their care. The theoretical sessions were complemented by guided tours of the National Library of Romania’s storage facilities, along with practical exercises focused on so called “destructured collections”, one of the institution’s most pressing conservation challenges. Working directly with real cases gave participants the opportunity to assess authentic scenarios of deterioration and, under the guidance of experts, to test intervention techniques and stabilisation methods for compromised items.
The two representatives from the Conservation Department of the National Library of France also carried out a thorough visit of all the storage facilities of the National Library of Romania, assessing both conservation conditions and the state of the book collections. Their evaluation will form the basis of a comprehensive report on “destructured collections”, offering recommendations and practical solutions for the implementation of enhanced conservation measures.