Monitoring and systematic status recording

We wish to retain an overview of the state of preservation of our collections at all times, so that we can effectively plan our collection preservation measures. If, for example, we are planning packaging and cleaning measures, it is important that we know how many of the media that are dirty are on which carrier material, and to what extent.

For this purpose, we use a regular monitoring procedure to record the state of all physical objects in our collection. Acute damages, such as insect infestations, are thus identified in good time. For this purpose, specially trained staff record the state of all holding groups in all stacks. We document the data thereby obtained in the “Bonpland” application. This app custom-developed for the German National Library enables us to record and evaluate the state of our collections in a statistically valid way.