Safeguarding documentary heritage at the Bibliothèque haïtienne des Spiritains

The Bibliothèque haïtienne des Spiritains (BHS), formerly known as Bibliothèque haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit, is the oldest library in Haiti, founded in 1873 in Port-au-Prince. It holds more than 35,000 books dating to as early as the 16th century, and nearly 1,000 scientific journals, 500 maps, and archive documents of all kinds. This collection forms a unique and invaluable documentation of Haitian history and culture as well as the history of the Americas and the Caribbean. Given the current security situation in Haiti, the BHS's collection must be subject to enhanced protection measures. In a first phase of preservation activities, the BHS, in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), mobilized experts in various fields (international project development, collection analysis, digitization, conservation, emergency issues, digital files integration, etc.) to document its collections and select which items required conservation work. The BnF also analyzed the BHS’ human and technical capacities to inventory, classify, index, digitize and put online the selected collection. The second phase of the project implements the conservation works for the selected collection of “Grey Literature”. This corpus consists of memoirs, reports, letters, newspapers, and texts covering more than a century of scientific, historical and cultural Haitian production in several disciplines.