Retrieval policies for cellulose acetate negative collections

At the City of Ottawa Archives we are moving our collection of over
1.5 million negatives to our cool vault and a good portion of these
are cellulose acetate negatives (10% are polyester).  Conservation
has established policies and procedures for retrieval in the aim of
limiting access time and frequency, in an effort to reduce any time
out of storage.  Each time an image is requested by the public or
staff, the process entails a month out of storage for that negative
or envelope of negatives.

Our challenge is that requests for reproduction and access usually
result in scanning the negatives pulled but it is not always
possible.  We are a small archive and due to the size of the
collection, some sections have yet to be processed.  Due to this,
access requests at times require retrieving an envelope which can
contain up to 100 negatives.

Conservation would like to limit access to one time only, but
unfortunately this may not be realistic in terms of our resources
for scanning and the number of public requests.

It would be very helpful in our decision making to be able to
compare the Retrieval Policies of other archival institutions with
cellulose acetate negative collections.

Silvia Kindl
Conservator/Restauratrice
City of Ottawa Archives/Archives de la ville d'Ottawa
100 Tallwood Dr,
Ottawa Ontario K2G 4R7
Canada


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 30:8
                   Distributed: Sunday, July 10, 2016
                        Message Id: cdl-30-8-019
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