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 These images are to be used for educational purposes only and should not be published without permission from the copyright holder.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

Silver gelatin prints in various stages of deterioration. Photographic prints may curl due to high humidity, high temperature, improper processing, or a combination of these factors. Newsprint, made from groundwood paper pulp, becomes brittle and yellow over time. Its deterioration is hastened by a poor storage climate. Foxing (small brown spots probably caused by mold or by the presence of tiny metal particles) often occurs when an item is stored in a humid climate. Red rot, a degradation process in leather, is usually a result of prolonged exposure to environmental pollution, high temperatures, and low relative humidity.