Monitoring biodiversity in libraries: a pilot study and perspectives for indoor air quality

Area of Science:

• Environmental microbiology
• Indoor air quality research
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• Libraries face unique challenges regarding indoor air quality (IAQ) due to paper storage and human presence.
• Microclimatic conditions can foster diverse microbial communities, including environmental and anthropic microorganisms, potentially affecting both collections and human health.

Purpose of the Study:

• To characterize the microflora biodiversity within library indoor environments using a multidisciplinary monitoring approach.
• To adapt biodiversity indexes for evaluating anthropic versus environmental microbial pollution.
• To assess the utility of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) as a marker for Indoor Air Microbial Biodiversity (IAMB).

Main Methods:

• Employed a multidisciplinary monitoring model to analyze indoor air.
• Utilized Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) for comprehensive microflora biodiversity characterization.
• Adapted biodiversity indexes, including Shannon mean index (H), species representativeness (EH), and human/environmental pollution ratio (SA), to analyze NGS data.

Main Results:

• Identified a generally low microbial load (IGCM/m³ < 1000) with 102 distinct species.
• Detected several cellulose-metabolizing bacteria, relevant to paper degradation.
• Established that library workers and visitors are significant sources of microbial contamination.

Conclusions:

• Indoor Air Quality in libraries is significantly influenced by microbial communities.
• Human occupants are a primary source of indoor air microbial contamination in libraries.
• Air biodiversity analysis using NGS shows promise as an effective marker for assessing IAQ.