ブックタイトルConservation and Restoration of Western Paper

概要

Conservation and Restoration of Western Paper

today’s document conservation. Since the1980s, libraries and archives all over theworld have had to take some significantcountermeasures against this problem, on alarge scale.Taking this as a starting point, a novelconcept for document conservation hasbeen developed. Not only the conventionalmethod for document conservation,i.e. treating individual documents thatwere degraded and damaged in use, butalso approaches to focus on all houseddocuments, in other words the entirecollection, including those which do notneed urgent treatment have been developedand enacted.Although preventive measures werealready based on this concept, collectionconservation is more advanced and hasbeen established as the way to plan andimplement required conservation measures(treatment techniques and preventativemeasures) by doing a health check of anentire collection.An assessment of condition of damageddocuments had been done previously.However, consideration of a whole collectionwas a new approach that was developedin the 1980s. When the number of paperbaseddocuments is limited, it is possible toexecute a complete enumeration. Otherwisea certain number of samples are chosenfrom an entire collection for conducting asample survey, which is a common method.Based on these surveys, the condition of alldocuments is evaluated, and then the valueof the documents and their prospectiveusage are estimated in order to grasp thepreservation needs of the collection. Then,realistic action plan is to be formulatedwhich matches preservation needs as well aspreservation capability of the institution.In other words, it is an operational cycle:Assessment→Prescription→Treatment, ora management cycle: Assessing preservationstate→Planning→Executing the plan.New approaches started to be inventedand executed. The NARS Twenty-yearPreservation Plan formulated in the 1980sby the US National Archives can be seen asa pioneering program in this subject. 9Surveying preservation needs andplanning a preservation program made ahuge impact on subsequent preservationactivities conducted in libraries and archives.3-4. Application of ReproductionTechnologies as PreservationMeasureThe fourth topic is the application ofreproduction techniques.Since ancient times, reproductiontechniques have been indispensablefor collecting, keeping, preserving andcirculating books and documents. However,applying reproduction technologies inaccordance with contemporary ideas inlibraries and archives started only in the1930s.In 1928, the Eastman Kodak Companyin US developed a camera exclusively formicrofilm. This photographic technique wasused to reproduce newspapers and otherdocuments.The technique spread first in US andthen worldwide from the 1940s to 1950s.16