Thursday, October 05, 2006

New Rare Book Facility at PA State Library

The Pennsylvania State Library has completed a five-year, $6.6 million construction project to create a facility for the library's rare book collections. "The new facility is able to preserve the historic collections through state-of-the-art environmental control systems. Temperature and humidity are regulated specific to vault locations, while the materials are protected from harmful air matter and gases by specially-designed filtration systems. The collection is also protected by special computer-controlled fire detection and suppression systems."

More than ten thousand volumes of books and periodicals make up the State Library's collection; many of the items focus on Pennsylvania history and government.