Mold

This is posted on behalf of a colleague who is not on the list:

    We are a small archives in Lake County, California and need
    advice as to how to treat one of our collections. We have
    approximately 50,000 manuscript pages that are a mixture of
    either computer printed pages with penciled changes or
    handwritten in India ink on acid-free paper.  They were kept in
    the tropics for a number of years and sent back to our archives
    recently.  The pages arrived moldy.  There isn't much staining
    but a definite smell of mold.

    Our climate in California is extremely hot and dry in the summer
    and cold and rainy in the winter.  The pages have been kept in a
    quarantine room for the last 12 months with no air conditioning
    or fans--summer temp is in the 90's, winter is kept at 70--
    before bringing them into our archives building and integrating
    them with the rest of our collection. We have another 50,000 or
    so still in the tropics, poised to return here soon.

    Do you have any recommendations as to how to efficiently treat
    these pages and the best way to store them in the meantime?  We
    would like to be able to treat them and place them in our
    archives as soon as possible.

    Anne Frappier

Scott Campbell
Director
Sacred Archives of Adidam

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 13:28
                 Distributed: Tuesday, November 2, 1999
                       Message Id: cdl-13-28-026
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