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 These images are to be used for educational purposes only and should not be published without permission from the copyright holder.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

Written and photographic documentation of the condition of an object is recorded by a conservator prior to beginning treatment. Washing in water removes dirt, reduces stains, and washes out acidic compounds from paper objects and book pages. Sometimes an alkaline material is added to the water to provide a buffer against acid formation in the future. Beginning in the mid- to late 1800s, silk gauze was often adhered to fragile or torn documents in an effort to strengthen them. Over time, however, the acidic silk deteriorated and caused further damage to the documents. Removal of the silk in a water bath is shown here. Pressure-sensitive tapes can both stain and chemically damage paper. They can be removed using heat, as shown here, or with organic solvents, or a combination of the two. Deacidification neutralizes acids and deposits an alkaline buffer that will protect the paper from the formation of acid in the future. Treatments involving organic solvents and other chemicals require the use of a fume hood. Sewing a text block is often accomplished by grouping several folios together, one inside another, to form sections. The sections are then sewn to each other with thread. Shown here: sewing on raised cords using a sewing frame. When the pages of a book are extremely weak and/or brittle, washing, deacidification, and encapsulation of each leaf in polyester film and post-binding can be a viable treatment option.