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 These images are to be used for educational purposes only and should not be published without permission from the copyright holder.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

Mid-19th century gold-stamped leather publisher's case binding. An early binding of an incunable—with blind stamping, a star boss, and remnants of leather straps and brass clasps—shows heat and water damage from a fire. A bound volume of large maps with multiple folds, used heavily by a sea captain, displays both water and handling damage. A bound volume of large maps with multiple folds, used heavily by a sea captain, displays both water and handling damage. Leather and cloth bound books. Detail of a metal clasp on a leather bound carte de visite album. The text block has broken into pieces, resulting in a stepped fore edge. Historic volumes rebound in leather bindings appropriate to the periods of the text blocks. Mid-19th century pictorial gold-stamped cloth binding based on an illustration in the text. Scrapbooks pose challenging preservation problems because they often contain a variety of objects, media, and adhesives. Detail of a scrapbook with brittle support pages. Brittle and loose fragments protrude beyond the text block—envelopes, folded newspapers, pamphlets, and a ribbon. Leaves from a disbound manuscript book. Iron gall ink shows sign of bleed-through and haloing. Disbound manuscript in which iron gall ink has significantly degraded the paper. Failed binding of a heavily used birth registry. A hot, humid climate contributed to the embrittlement and discoloration of the pages. 16th-century blind-stamped, full leather binding of a bible. Notice the dolphin bosses in the corners. Detail of manuscript on 19th-century blue paper, often found in archival collections. Discoloration and breakage often occur along creases when documents remain folded for a long period. Oversize 19th-century maps can require extensive conservation treatment. Extensive losses are visible long the top where this map was hung. Traditional oriental binding. The outer silk-thread sewing is often decorative rather than structural. Ephemeral materials were not created to last but often constitute a significant portion of archival collections.