Paper degradation has been studied extensively over the past few decades from both the conservation and the material science perspectives. This review focuses on the quantifiable impacts of the environment and material composition, from the viewpoint of long-term storage of historic paper-based collections. Therefore, temperature, relative humidity and their variation, and pollution are of major interest while photoinitiated processes are covered only briefly.New experiments comparing the effects of the most abundant indoor pollutants (NO 2 , acetic acid and formaldehyde) and the effects of fluctuating temperature and relative humidity are also presented as part of the discussion. This work highlights the need for revision of the existing doseresponse (damage) functions for paper and their further development.
KeywordsHistoric paper; hydrolysis; oxidation; viscometry; colorimetry; heritage science
Historic paperDespite the ubiquity of electronic media, paper is still the most generally readable carrier of information. In heritage institutions, collections of documents of the past are being preserved for posterity. It has been estimated that in a typical Western repository, 70-80% of these documents [1] are likely to be acidic and therefore prone to rapid deterioration, their useful lifetime being about a century, a couple at best. This is in a stark contrast to paper produced before ca. 1850, the lifetime of which may be longer for at least a factor of 10 [1]. For curators of these collections, interventive conservation is an option, although the throughput of even mass treatments [2] is not sufficient to address the scale of the problem and the resources are too limited. Stab 96 (2011Stab 96 ( ) 2029Stab 96 ( -2039 2 In many cases, preventive conservation is therefore the preferred option. However, environmental managers may struggle with the abundance of literature available on environmental effects on paper degradation and the surprisingly scarce data that is well quantified and relevant not only to the scientist but to the user as well. Unlike a recent comprehensive review of the basic mechanistic and thermodynamic concepts [3], the focus of the present review is to provide an overview of dose response functions, based on which environmental management in paper-based collections could be optimised to minimise degradation while optimising resource use.
Published in Polym DegradThe main structural component of paper is cellulose. As a linear homopolymer, it is composed of identical monomers and scission of inter-monomer bonds leads to its degradation [4]. It is well known that apart from temperature, water (humidity) and acidity in paper are important factors in its degradation [5][6][7]. Acid-catalysed hydrolysis is a major cause of paper strength loss [5,7], although other mechanisms may take place as well, such as oxidation and thermal degradation [7,8], depending on the experimental conditions. The effect of oxygen on the hydrolytic pathway should not be neglected, as differences between accelerate...