15
th
International Congress on Archives
Komatsu
www.wien2004.ica.org
2
The disaster prevention committee decided to apply the disaster measures to archives.
The disaster prevention committee made a guidance to handle disaster measures archives.
Moreover the disaster prevention committee has built up the networks among archives for the
mutual help and support at the time of disaster.
The disaster prevention committee has been hosting the study session to handle damaged records
and dater for the staff members of the library who usually treat data and books.
The purpose of the study session is to learn the fundamental knowledge on how to take
emergency measures to the documents and data damaged by the flood or fire.
Major participants to this study session are those who are treating documents and data at
government offices, archives, museums and so on.
When the archives and books which we keep and handle every day are damaged by fire, what
should we do or what policies should we take?
And what should we pay attentions in our daily operations?
We thought, "If we actually experience the cases that will possibly happen at the time of disaster,
we will learn what we should do."
We held the disaster prevention study session on January 29
t h
, 1999.
60 persons participated.
The participants observed the process from putting fire and extinguishing and learned possible
emergency measures to the damaged data and put them into practice.
Of course this experiment is largely different form the actual fire.
Our mental attitude is also different, because we knew it was an experiment.
But this combustion experiment gave us a kind of impact. We learned what we can not get from
the paper or the study on the desk.
We took a video of the experiment and made this tape.
