Skip to Content

Photos available for download
Preservation Education Curriculum Image Library

Images have been provided to assist you in illustrating most of the lessons. This collection should not be considered the definitive source for preservation images. Rather, use it to enhance your presentations and perhaps update some of your existing images. NEDCC is grateful to the many vendors and institutions—libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies—that were willing to share their photographs for this project.

These photographs are available as 72 dpi JPEG files, which can be downloaded for multimedia presentations in the classroom. You can view the caption and copyright notice for each photograph when you view the enlarged image. These images are to be used for educational purposes only and should not be published without permission from the copyright holder.

Click on the classes (left) to view image thumbnails.
Click on a thumbnail to enlarge the image.

Brushes with natural bristles. Preserving the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1951. Detail of a double elephant folio Audubon hand-colored engraving. Air drying a damp bound manuscript. Collections care tools and supplies. Manuscript detail; iron gall ink shows signs of deterioration. Iron gall ink has penetrated the leaves of a disbound manuscript. Syrian parchment manuscript from 917 A.D. Tightly rolled bound manuscript. Flood-damaged files on the floor of a storage shed. Copy presses, an 18th-century invention for making multiple copies, were adopted to serve as nipping presses for bound volumes and loose text blocks. Assortment of bookbinding and book conservation tools. The medium-format Kodak 616 collapsible camera used nitrate film. Conservator examining a photographic print using a binocular microscope. Albumen cartes de visites. Seaweed adhered to a scrapbook page. Botanical specimens can present special preservation challenges to the archivist.