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DEGRADATION PRODUCTS IN PAPER: NOT ALL ACIDIC

The literature section of The Abbey Newsletter, Nov. 1994, included the following article:

“An Investigation of Some Environmental Factors Affecting Migration-induced Degradation in Paper,” by John Slovene & Jim Hanna. Restaurator v 13, 1992, p. 78-94.

“Acid migration is like the weather -everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it.” Slavin & Hanlan looked up previous research on migration of degradation products and did some research of their own. What they found does not always support common assumptions, although everyone has seen examples of mat-burn, discoloration from newspaper clippings stuck between book pages and so on.

Not all volatile degradation products are acidic. Both William J. Barrow and Vincent Daniels have cited cases in which products migrating from a material of higher pH affected a more acidic neighbor. This may indicate oxidative degradation, which produces peroxides and discoloration.

Buffered storage enclosures are commonly advocated for most records and artifacts, but there are some questions about how much good they do. For instance, Santucci found that an alkaline reserve could only be effective in slowing degradation if the RH was 70% or higher. Has anybody confirmed this? And how important is it for enclosures to have an alkaline buffer if the environment is very dry? Or very cold? So the authors studied the effectiveness of buffered and unbuffered interleaving tissue in preventing migration of volatiles from old, degraded newspaper to new Whatman filter paper. They aged the papers under different conditions, apart and together, encapsulated in Mylar and “exposed.” When RH in the aging oven was high (78-82%), just as Santucci said, the buffered interleaving paper did protect the Whatman paper. They concluded that it was due to volatile substances from the newsprint, but were unable to identify any of them with certainty. Unbuffered tissue did not have a significant effect under any conditions.