Protecting Irreplaceable Collections in Salt Lake City

The Church History Library in Salt Lake City provides archival storage and public access to materials that chronicle the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1830 to the present. The library is open to the public and welcomes thousands of patrons who use its resources, including 270,000 books, 150,000 manuscript collections, 2.5 million photographs, 5,000 oral histories, and countless recordings and microfilm masters. Protecting these irreplaceable collections from fire – as well as library patrons and employees – is imperative.

This case study looks at how the Church History Library partnered with Johnson Controls to install an INERGEN Clean Agent Fire Suppression System. The INERGEN system offers fire protection to the various vaults housed in the library by quickly detecting and suppressing fires without causing collateral damage to paper or digitized materials. The system is paired with an early warning device to detect impending fires even before flames appear. And the fire suppression agent is non-hazardous to both people and the environment.