Glassine

Lauren Jones <collectionscare [at] rhqre__co__uk> writes

>...  I have read recently that glassine could be used as a
>slip sheet for between prints and drawings (Margaret Holben Ellis'
>Care of Prints and Drawings).  But when I mentioned this to a
>visiting conservator, she was a bit dubious about its use.  So, can
>anyone confirm the good or bad points of using glassine, I have now
>purchased a huge roll, at some expense, from Preservation Equip Ltd
>UK who pitch it as "transparent, smooth with a pH of 7.0,
>unbuffered..."

I think that glassine's translucency and smoothness outweigh any
negative aspects.  It has been the interleaving material of choice
for works on paper and photographs at the Achenbach Foundation for
fifty years.  I have been engaged in a project to replace old
(brittle and discolored) glassine.  While I continue to do that, I
have found no empirical evidence of contact damage from the old
glassine, in the way that you often see staining clearly
attributable to a paper's contact with a lignin containing material.
We recently were given some albums of prints long encased in the
worst glassine I have ever seen--dark brown and extremely brittle. I
was astonished to pull the prints out of these enclosures and find
the paper supports "white" and seemingly not discolored by prolonged
contact with terribly degraded glassine. It has made me feel more
comfortable with our institution's choice of interleaving material.

Debra Evans
Head of Paper Conservation
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park
100 34th Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94121
415-750-7661


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 27:1
                  Distributed: Wednesday, June 5, 2013
                        Message Id: cdl-27-1-003
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