[PLUG-TALK] Books and paper and a-ha! moments

[Rich Shepard]

On Sun, 11 Dec 2005, Russell Senior wrote:

> One of his points, which he makes thoroughly in one of his books, is that
> the importance of acid-free paper is wildly exaggerated. Lots of
> pre-"archive quality" paper is surviving just fine, but is being disposed
> of under the pretense that it is falling apart. See this:

   This is demonstrated quite well by photographs taken more than 100 years
ago that are still in excellent condition, despite the paper, emulsion,
processing, and storage all not according to the current thinking on archival
processing and storage.

> Not that he wants your collection either, but the point is that libraries
> are/were disposing of archives of artifacts en masse with no apparent
> consideration that at least a few originals were preserved on paper. And
> (to transition from his rant to mine) exchanging their owned copies of
> paper (and even microform) artifacts on which copyright will
> (theoretically) one day expire, for perpetually rented, ephemeral,
> digitized copies from "database vendors".

   I've been bothered by this movement away from paper storage ever since I
first read about it however many years ago. Yes, it takes room and money to
store all the paper, but it is still the only documented format that has been
proven to last. Quite a few years ago I was surprised to learn that many of
the newspapers buried in landfills during the 1940s and 1950s were still
readable decades later. Newsprint is not the most durable paper, and
landfills are not the most suitable for preservation, but the newspaper was
preserved.

   This is not to say that all newsprint is well preserved regardless of
treatment. A new neighbor has left the Oregonian's food day editions on his
driveway, uncollected for several weeks. After driving over the plastic a few
times, the rains turned the paper into a mess of pulp that has been
distributed far and wide by their vehicle tires.

Rich

-- 
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |   Author of "Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic"
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517         Fax: 503-667-8863