The National Open Access Scientific Communication and Information Centre (SCIC) that is being founded by the University of Vilnius is going to be the most European library in the country. Quite a focus is on the modern technology as the building will feature, for the first time in Lithuania, a high-pressure water mist fire-protection system. It will help keeping nearly two millions of publications safe in the event of fire.

The 14,000 square-metre SCIC building will be built and outfitted by the year 2012. The idea of the centre is to provide the free access to any kind of information and therefore nearly 1.8 million items of printed material, including books, publications and documents will be deposited in the library repositories. Information will be available in digital media as well.

To guarantee safety of the priceless sources of information, the ordering party of the project has posed the highest requirements for fire extinguishing systems. The administration of the VU library has ran its own inquiry and analysed the experience of the world’s most renowned libraries and archives, visited dozens of facilities that use the most innovative technological solutions to fight fire. The high-pressure water mist fire-protection system that has been adopted is currently the choice of the most modern Western libraries and archives.

“If we were to fight fire at the library in the conventional way, with water, the fire would be contained, the building saved but the water would ruin the publications and other property. The system we will be deploying uses 80 per cent less water compared to the standard sprinkler system. This leads to a lower risk of damaging the books that are kept at the library,” Giedrius Zaicevas, director of Fima Security solutions department said.

The state-of-the-art fire extinguishing system will be installed both in the repositories and in other premises of the centre. The level of its complexity, however, will be higher in the repositories. The system deployed in other premises of the centre will trigger automatically when a certain air temperature is identified, while the hardware installed in the repositories will come with double fire identification arrangements, consisting of smoke sensors and mist sprayers that will be triggered automatically if the temperature inside the room reaches a certain pre-set value. This will allow avoiding extinguishing fire when it is not needed, for instance, if the personnel manage to neutralise the sources of smoke or if the alarm has been triggered in error.

In the words of Giedrius Zaicevas, the system to be installed at the library will come from the Finnish mist system manufacturer Marioff Corporation Oy. It is defined by a level of pressure that is 15-20 times higher than that in similar systems already installed by Fima for several companies within the country. The Marioff Corporation Oy high-pressure water mist fire-extinguishing technology has been installed in various facilities around the world: at the National Portrait Gallery in Great Britain, the Madrid subway in Spain, the world’s largest cruise ship Oasis, data centres of different countries, etc.