Historical Documents – What Not to Do

I was driving to work the other day and I heard a story on NPR that caught my attention. As I mentioned recently, I have become interested in archiving and preserving documents and other ephemera. Finding documents to preserve seems to be one of the first challenges, but that aside I have done a bit of research into how to do it well. Rainy days, like today, make me cringe a little because I know that humidity is the enemy of paper. It has made me cringe since my days of working at a bookstore. I'd walk into the store in the morning and past a table full of beautiful trade paperback books. All of their covers would be curled up, as if at a sort of clumsy attention. Clearly something had changed in the climate controlled environment overnight that had an effect on the paper. We would move the curled books to the bottom of the stacks to let the weight of the other books press them back into submission. There wasn't much to be done with the mass market paperback books (made of cheaper paper) that had puffed up as a result of the paper absorbing H₂O from the air.

I have purchased some acid-free plastic sheet protectors and notebooks in my enthusiasm to begin my new project. Then I heard this story on NPR.

http://www.npr.org/2017/02/21/515410087/an-attempt-to-save-south-carolinas-historical-documents-is-destroying-them

Apparently, in the mid-twentieth century a method for preserving documents became popular – something that anybody who was ever in school in the 80's and 90's would be familiar with: laminating. You put a sheet of plastic on either side of a document and run it through the machine and voilà – your document is protected and impervious to spills and dirt. School papers and historical documents are different, though, and there were some very serious long-term effects of sealing paper inside of plastic.

I suppose we've learned a lot since the 1960's. The plastic sheet protectors that I bought are acid free (so the packaging says) and "archival quality". But, what will we learn in the next few years about these products? Will there be a chemical that we learn the hard way is doing damage that we are not currently aware of? One thing I think that we can be sure of is that we have learned the lesson of rushing into the latest craze. I feel that professionals have learned that time-tested methods are the ones to rely on, and if there is a new product or method available, they'd probably (hopefully) be skeptical; let others try them and watch for results before subjecting a state's original signed Constitution to the new ideas. Ideas that have consistently proven to be effective are about limiting the documents from exposure to damaging circumstances: humidity, light and unstable materials like glues, plastics and papers that are not archive-appropriate. 

I think in my next job I want to work in a place that preserves and repairs books. Perhaps that's where my true calling is. When that happens I'll be sure to let you know about it here. Until then, I remain,

Yours truly,

Earnie Painter