Conservation treatment guidelines

Local governments in New York State use a variety of vendors to
conserve their bound records. Some treatments are standard, others
include questionable materials and practices. As part of a general booklet
on conserving bound volumes that we are developing, we would like to
include a set of guidelines/specifications/best practices that local
governments can use to judge the quality of the work from the different
vendors. We are looking for as specific information as possible. For
instance, that re-enforcing of paper should be done with Japanese tissue
and not cerex nylon. If am wondering if others have developed any such
treatment guidelines, and if so would they be willing to share them with
me.

    **** Moderator's comments: In a followup message Prudence
    offered additional background:

    Some of our vendors tell our patrons that all paper is acidic
    and fragile and that all pre-20th century ink is iron-gall,
    therefore they must always disbind, deacidify, and re-enforce
    every page. They get the governments to buy into rebinding with
    leather and gold tooling as well. Clearly some of these
    practices are unnecessary and as I mentioned some of the
    treatments are at best questionable, some we know (like using
    cerex nylon) are harmful. One of our problems is we can't just
    tell the governments to be sure the processes are reversible
    since the vendors are telling them it is without telling them
    all the chemicals they have to use to reverse the glues. We'd
    ideally like to set up some acceptable parameters.

Thank your for your assistance,

Prudence Backman
Local Government Archival Advisory Services
New York State Archives and Records Administration
518-474-4372
Fax: 518-473-4941

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 10:13
                  Distributed: Thursday, July 25, 1996
                       Message Id: cdl-10-13-002
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