National Library Provides Details Regarding the Fire Incident

The National Library of Armenia has presented details regarding the fire incident: "Under the state of emergency, the National Library of Armenia has operated only online, while the servers have been configured remotely. On May 10, to determine the reasons behind the internet connectivity failure and the unavailability of the electronic repositories of the National Library, staff discovered several electrical devices in a smoky condition with the help of a police officer responsible for the building's security. Subsequently, an employee from the Ministry of Emergency Situations also arrived on-site. The library administration immediately submitted a request to the Minister of Emergency Situations to clarify the nature and circumstances of the incident; however, relevant specialists have not yet arrived to investigate the circumstances of the incident at the library.

Since the police officers in charge of the building's security and the library's security staff noted that there had been power fluctuations and outages, the administration has also sent a request to the director of the electricity distribution company for information regarding scheduled and preventive outages and power fluctuations, to which no response has yet been received.

Regarding the server equipment and the materials stored within them, all digitized and archived materials have been preserved on separate storage devices throughout the years; therefore, there has been no loss of archived materials in this regard. The technical condition of the server devices, based on the external assessment by a library specialist, is encouraging, but a full evaluation can only be made after testing them, which will be possible after the Ministry of Emergency Situations conducts an investigation and provides an official report on the incident.

The library is now taking steps to transfer its entire working database and all digitized materials to a cloud system and make it available to the reading public again."