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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 These images are to be used for educational purposes only and should not be published without permission from the copyright holder.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.

This HD tape, recovered from a flash flood in Africa during the making of a documentary, shows how water will enter and carry debris into a cassette. All of the recording was recovered. Paper expands when wet. When books become saturated and they have no room to expand, they can literally pop off the shelf. In a flood, books stored on the bottom shelf are often the most damaged. In March 2004, a hot water pipe burst and flooded the off-site storage facility of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Water had been pumped out overnight but the high-water mark is still visible on the cardboard boxes. After Hurricane Katrina parts of this collection of microfiche developed mold. This flat file filled with water during Hurricane Katrina. The objects inside were covered in mold and stained by rust from the oxidized metal depressor at the front of the drawer. Mud often accompanies water in a flood. Muddy objects must be treated carefully. Pages of a wet book tend to cockle, or warp, as they dry. When objects get wet and then dry, tidelines are often left behind. These lines of residue are created by the movement of inks, acids, or other contaminants in the paper. The pages of this bound parchment manuscript have cockled, not as a result of being in water, but as a result of exposure to high humidity.