Preservation Challenges in Libraries of Developing Countries

Walk into a college library in Chennai, Kolkata, or Guwahati during the monsoon, and you may notice a faint musty smell rising from the older shelves. That smell is not just age. It is the sound of chemistry and biology working against the collection in real time. Libraries in developing countries hold some of the richest documentary heritage on earth, yet they fight an uphill battle to keep it intact. The reasons are twofold: a punishing climate that speeds up decay, and economic limitations that make the standard “textbook” solutions almost impossible to afford. Understanding why this combination is so damaging is the first step toward preserving these collections for the future.

Why preservation is harder in the developing world 🔗

Preservation is a challenge everywhere because all collections decay with age and use. But libraries in developing countries face a distinct cluster of obstacles. According to a widely cited overview, economic, historical, environmental, and political factors combine to make book and manuscript preservation exceptionally difficult in these regions. Materials are often printed on fragile, low-quality paper and ink, collections face heavy use with little protection, and the supporting infrastructure is frequently unreliable.

This is not a marginal problem. India alone is estimated to hold around five million manuscripts, the largest collection of manuscripts in the world, written on palm leaf, birch bark, and paper across many languages and scripts. Multiply that by the public libraries, university collections, and archives spread across the tropics, and the scale of the preservation task becomes clear. The two forces working hardest against these collections are climate and cost.

Climate factors: the tropical accelerator 🔗

The single biggest threat to library materials in developing countries is the environment they sit in. Most of these countries fall within tropical or subtropical zones, where heat and moisture are constant rather than seasonal exceptions. Researchers studying archives in eastern and southern Africa concluded that temperature and humidity pose the major preservation challenges in most tropical countries. In fact, they noted that archival management in such areas is governed more by climate than by any other professional concern.

How heat and humidity speed up chemical decay 🔗

Paper deteriorates through chemical reactions, and those reactions speed up as temperature rises. As a general rule, the higher the temperature, the faster materials break down, while cooler conditions extend their life. The Cornell preservation tutorial notes that the ideal storage temperature is around 20 to 21 degrees Celsius, consistently maintained across the storage area. The same source makes a crucial point: these standards are based on temperate climates and may be unattainable in very humid tropical regions.

Humidity makes the problem worse. Most paper made after the mid-nineteenth century is acidic, and moisture drives a process called acid hydrolysis that slowly weakens the cellulose fibres holding a page together. In humid Indian conditions, this acid hydrolysis is accelerated, which is one reason deacidification becomes so important and yet so difficult to implement at scale. Pages turn brittle, edges crumble, and text is eventually lost.

Biological deterioration: mould and pests 🔗

Warm, damp air is also an invitation to living organisms. Fungi are the clearest example. They stay dormant in dry conditions, but research on tropical archives notes that once relative humidity reaches around seventy percent, they thrive and multiply. The result is the visible mould and that characteristic musty smell on older books. A review of biological deterioration in the tropics explains that high humidity and temperature favour microorganisms that secrete acids and pigments which discolour and damage paper.

Insects add a second biological front. Silverfish, booklice, termites, and beetles all flourish in warm conditions and feed directly on paper, starch-based glues, and bindings. Organic materials common in India, such as palm leaf manuscripts and textile or animal-glue bindings, are particularly attractive to these pests. This is why preservation specialists recommend that tropical libraries adopt integrated pest management rather than relying on occasional fumigation.

A threat to digital media too 🔗

It would be a mistake to assume that microfilm, magnetic tape, or other modern formats escape the climate problem. The opposite can be true. Studies of tropical preservation warn that microfilm and similar media are in more immediate danger from the combination of high heat and humidity than traditional paper is. So even when a library invests in reformatting its collection, the new copies need a controlled environment to survive. Climate is not a problem you solve once; it is a permanent condition you must continually manage.

Economic limitations: the cost of fighting the climate 🔗

If the climate is the disease, environmental control is the treatment, and that treatment is expensive. This is where economic limitations turn a technical challenge into a near-impossible one for many institutions. The standard preservation toolkit, including air-conditioning, dehumidification, and deacidification, was largely developed in wealthy, temperate countries and assumes resources that most libraries in the developing world simply do not have.

Air-conditioning and dehumidification 🔗

Keeping a large book stack at a steady cool temperature and a safe humidity level around the clock requires powerful, continuously running equipment. In a tropical climate, where the outside air is hot and saturated with moisture for much of the year, the machines must work much harder than they would in Europe or North America. Discussing the situation in tropical Puerto Rico, one specialist pointed out the sheer impracticality of mounting modern environmental controls to stabilise temperature and humidity, noting that the expense in both energy and manpower could outweigh the benefit to the collection.

Dehumidification is a particular pain point. General climate control reduces moisture in the air, but libraries in very humid regions or those recovering from water damage often need dedicated dehumidifiers, such as desiccant units using silica gel, which add further capital and running costs. For a library already struggling to pay staff and buy new books, installing and maintaining this equipment in every storage room is rarely realistic.

The hidden cost: unreliable electricity 🔗

Even where a library can afford the equipment, it cannot always afford to run it. Environmental control only protects a collection if it operates continuously. A modern library is, in effect, an energy-dependent institution that relies on electricity to function. In many parts of the Global South, frequent power outages and load shedding interrupt that supply. Each outage means the air-conditioning stops, humidity climbs, and the collection is exposed to exactly the conditions preservation aims to prevent.

Institutions try to bridge the gap with backup generators and UPS systems. Researchers describe how some universities, such as Mzuzu University in Malawi, connected a generator to strategic buildings including the library to keep services running during outages. But the same study cautions that generators and UPS systems are only temporary fixes because they are prohibitively expensive and out of reach for many institutions. The cost of preservation, in other words, includes the cost of a reliable power supply that the wider economy cannot guarantee.

Deacidification: effective but unaffordable at scale 🔗

Deacidification directly addresses the acid that destroys paper from within. The technique neutralises acids and leaves an alkaline buffer to slow future deterioration. Methods range from washing loose documents in alkaline solutions to spray and vapour-phase treatments for materials that cannot get wet. The problem is scale and cost. The high price of commercial mass deacidification services has limited its implementation in resource-constrained settings, pushing some institutions to develop modified, lower-cost methods using locally available materials. When you are facing millions of acidic pages, treating them at international rates is financially out of the question.

The Indian response and its constraints 🔗

India offers a useful example of both the ambition and the limits of preservation in a developing country. The National Mission for Manuscripts, launched in February 2003 under the Ministry of Culture, was set up to survey, document, conserve, and digitise the country’s vast manuscript wealth. It has built bibliographic databases, run conservation workshops, and created digital repositories.

Yet the constraints are real. Experts note that preserving manuscripts has multiple dimensions, beginning with physical preservation through deacidification and temperature and humidity control, and that the budget must stretch across conservation and digitisation at the same time. Analyses of the Mission’s effectiveness repeatedly highlight funding constraints, environmental threats, and a shortage of skilled professionals as recurring obstacles. A national mission can coordinate effort and raise awareness, but it cannot single-handedly install climate control in every regional library and archive.

Working around the limits 🔗

Because the textbook solutions are often out of reach, libraries in developing countries rely heavily on low-cost, preventive strategies. Good air circulation, regular dusting and inspection, careful shelf spacing, protective enclosures, and basic pest monitoring cost relatively little and prevent a great deal of damage. These passive measures buy time and reduce the burden on expensive machinery.

Digitisation has also become a key strategy, since a digital surrogate preserves the content even if the physical object cannot be perfectly protected. The COVID-19 period reinforced how valuable digital access is, because digital documents can be shared regardless of whether a building is open. International support helps too. Programmes such as the Elsevier Foundation’s Innovative Libraries initiative have funded digitisation, preservation, and librarian training projects in developing countries, and partnerships between institutions in wealthy and developing nations share expertise that money alone cannot buy. None of these measures replace a fully controlled environment, but together they offer a realistic path within tight budgets.

What do you think? If a library cannot afford full climate control, where should its limited preservation budget go first, into protecting the original physical collection or into digitising it before it decays further? And how much responsibility should wealthier nations and international bodies bear for preserving documentary heritage that belongs to the whole world?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_preservation_in_developing_countries
2. https://www.localsamosa.com/people-culture/preserving-manuscripts-10627625
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240754788_Environmental_Monitoring_and_Control_at_National_Archives_and_Libraries_in_Eastern_and_Southern_Africa
4. https://chinapreservationtutorial.library.cornell.edu/content/climate-control/
5. https://cool.culturalheritage.org/byauth/teygeler/tropical.pdf
6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235305909_A_review_of_biological_deterioration_of_library_materials_and_possible_control_strategies_in_the_tropics
7. https://www.iias.asia/sites/default/files/2020-11/IIAS_NL30_35.pdf
8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383404233_Librarying_Under_the_Candlelight_The_Impact_of_Electricity_Power_Outages_on_Library_Services
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Mission_for_Manuscripts
10. https://www.insightsonindia.com/2025/02/20/the-national-mission-for-manuscripts-aims-to-document-digitize-and-preserve-indias-manuscript-heritage-analyze-the-challenges-and-effectiveness-of-such-initiatives-in-conserving-indias-writ/
11. https://www.fundsforngos.org/all-listings/innovative-libraries-for-developing-countries/