Pens with permanent ink

In my last posting I asked about permanent/archival ballpoint pens.
Dale Peters wrote about a "Scottish investigation of various
commercial products, published in the Abbey Newsletter a few years
back". I have searched the Abbey Newsletter on CoOL but could find no
such article. Does anyone know the title of the article, and the
date, volume numbers, etc of the newsletter that contained it?

    **** Moderator's comments: CoOL currently has only issues
    published since 1992; we're hard at work on converting the
    earlier issues.

    In looking for the citation you need (sorry, couldn't find it),
    I came upon some interesting citations in BCIN, and thought I'd
    pass them along as I don't think they've been mentioned here.

    Wood, Rose M. and Stephen L. Williams. "An evaluation of
    disposable pens for permanent museum records" Curator, Volume
    36, Number 3, September 1993, pp. 189-200

    Horie, Velson and J. Barry.
    "Solvent resistance of marking inks"
    Conservation news. United Kingdom Institute for Conservation of
    Historic and Artistic Works. Number 41, March 1990, pp. 11-12

Also, Cathy Atwood asked what I would write on with the pens. The
pens will be used on an acid-free commercial paper by an author
whose original handwritten writings we are collecting and keeping in
our archives. A fiber tip marker is not an option, nor is a fountain
pen or nib pen with India ink.

We have writings going back 30 years, the earliest of which were
written with the classic BIC pen of the era and on cheap yellow
notepad paper. We have de-acidified those with a calcium bicarbonate
solution. One concern I have is the permanence of the ink used on
these oldest writings, especially with the need for repeated
washings--even if they are 10-15 years apart. So far the BIC ink
seems to be fine. But my other concern is that I do not know if, or
really, when the acid-free paper currently in use will also need
such treatment. Assuming it will, the ink from this ballpoint pen I
am looking for must similarly be able to survive immersion in water
and not feather or bleed or fade.

The only lead I have so far is the Ballograf pen from Sweden, which
a DistList member wrote to me about. It has been used for the last
30 years by the Swedish state administration and been tested and
approved for archival use by their national testing institute. The
Swedes have tested thousands of products and given them Swedish
Arkiv certification numbers. I am currently waiting for a response
from their testing institute about the tests they apply to ballpoint
pens. The Ballograf can be found in the US in a few Scandinavian
gift shops in major cities. The US distributor is Nord Mark in
Minneapolis, 612-559-3324.

Scott Campbell
Sacred Archives of Adidam

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 11:31
                Distributed: Wednesday, October 1, 1997
                       Message Id: cdl-11-31-007
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