Handling materials on television

Thank you to all who responded to my comments regarding handling
documents on television, I am glad it stimulated debate. I take on
board many of the responses and appreciate cotton gloves are not
always appropriate for handling archival material and am certainly
not dogmatic about their use. Indeed I will see if we can trail some
latex ones in our search room.  My main point was more about the
*perception* of care to documents etc by viewers of historical
television programmes. Where appropriate, gloves (cotton or
otherwise), washing hands, a book cradle, packaging, taking care not
to touch the document or text etc are all simple ways of drawing the
principle of preservation to the attention of the viewers. Perhaps
there needs to be a set of guidelines or standards endorsed by our
respective organisations that is made available to
broadcasters/television companies to help them help us raise
awareness about caring for our heritage.

Shirley Jones
Conservator
West Yorkshire Archive Service
Registry of Deeds
Newstead Road
Wakefield WF1 2DE


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 17:14
                   Distributed: Friday, July 25, 2003
                       Message Id: cdl-17-14-004
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