Iron gall ink corrosion

As in most libraries and archives, our main problem is iron gall ink
corrosion.  On some manuscripts, the pages dyed with a yellowish red
or brown color show more aggressive ink corrosion.  Even at adjacent
papers, one with regular color and the other with that strange color
shows different degrees of corrosion.

XRF analysis showed the presence of Fe as the major component.  For
organic dye the possibility of HPLC seems logical. What further
analysis would you recommend I carry out?  Do you have any ideas
about what is responsible for this different degradation?

Pinar Cakar
Chemical engineer, Presidency of Turkey Manuscript Institution
Director for Conservation of Manuscripts and Archives


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 27:38
                   Distributed: Sunday, April 6, 2014
                       Message Id: cdl-27-38-015
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