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 These images are to be used for educational purposes only and should not be published without permission from the copyright holder.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

Detail of a reel of microfilm. Before filming, materials are examined page by page to ensure that they are in the correct order and nothing is missing. Targets (guides to the content) are created and reel breaks are determined. During the review process, special instructions for the filmers are noted. Quality control includes bibliographic inspection, where the film is checked page by page against the original. Inspection of the film is an important aspect of the RLG guidelines for preservation microfilming. A densitometer is used to determine the density of an image or film base during quality control. Fold-out maps often become brittle and tear at the folds. A preservation facsimile can be made while the fragile original is kept in safe storage. Deteriorating negatives, such as broken glass plate negatives and nitrate- or acetate-based negatives, may need to be duplicated. Contact-printing the original negative to film produces a positive image, called an interpositive. A preservation facsimile can enhance the original.